Psalm Translation

Psalm Culture in the English Renaissance: Readings of Psalm 137 by Shakespeare, Spenser,
Milton, and Others

Author(s): Hannibal Hamlin
Source: Renaissance Quarterly, Vol. 55, No. 1 (Spring, 2002), pp. 224-257
Published by: The University of Chicago Press on behalf of the Renaissance Society of America
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PsalmCulturein theEnglishRenaissance:
ReadingsofPsalm137 byShakespeare,
Spenser,
Milton,and Others*
by HANNIBAL HAMLIN
Psalm137, "Bythe Watersof Babylonwe sat downand wept,"one of the mostwidelyknown

biblicaltextsin RenaissanceEngland,providedconsolation for spiritualandpoliticalexiles,as well
as giving Shakespeare, Spenser,and Milton language which to expresssuchalienation-
in
languageespeciallypowerfulforpoets,sincethepsalmtropedalienationas the inabilityto sing.
ThePsalmsclosingcryfor vengeance, seenas un-Christianbysome,wasusedas a call to armsby
polemicistson bothsidesof theEnglishCivil War.Thisstudyexaminesa rangeof translations,
paraphrases,commentaries, sermons,and literaryallusionsthattogetherreconstructa biblicaltext
as it wasinterpreted
by its Renaissancereaders.
1. By the rivers of Babylon, there we sat down, yea, we wept, when we

remembered Zion.
2. We hanged our harps upon the willows in the midst thereof.
3. For there they that carried us away captive required of us a song; and they
that wasted us required of us mirth, saying, Sing us one of the songs
of Zion.
4. How shall we sing the Lord'ssong in a strange land?
5. If I forget thee, O Jerusalem, let my right hand forget her cunning.
6. If I do not remember thee, let my tongue cleave to the roof of my mouth;
if I prefer not Jerusalem above my chief joy.
7. Remember, O Lord, the children of Edom in the day of Jerusalem;who said,
Rase it, rase it, even to the foundation thereof.
8. O daughter of Babylon, who art to be destroyed; happy shall he be, that
rewardeth thee as thou hast served us.
9. Happy shall he be, that taketh and dasheth thy little ones against the stones.'
*Forhelpfuladviceat variousstagesin the researchand writingof this article,I would

like to thankJohnHollander,ThomasM. Greene,PaulaLoscocco,LawrenceManley,Anna-
bel Patterson,DavidQuint,JohnN. King,andmy RQ readers,Diane KelseyMcColley,PG.
Stanwood,and PaulF Grendler.
'As an initialreminderof the text of Psalm137, I reproduceherethe KingJamesVer-
sion (spellingand punctuationmodernized),since it is probablythe Renaissancetranslation
most widelyknownamongmodernreaders.This is not to imply,of course,that it was so in
the Renaissance.Forreadersin sixteenth-and seventeenth-century England,the best known
versionwould have been that of the Book of Common Prayer,which was essentiallythe
translationof the 1539 GreatBibleby MilesCoverdale(andwhichwasactuallythe sourceof
much of the languageof the laterKJVtext).
Renaissance Quarterly 55 (2002): 224-257 [224]

PSALM CULTURE IN THE ENGLISH RENAISSANCE 225
he Reformationopenedthe doorto bothvernaculartranslationand in-

dividual interpretation of the Bible, and one of the immediate and
lasting results was a widespread "psalm culture," in which poets, theolo-
gians, and devoted dilettantes produced hundreds of translations,
paraphrases,and adaptations of the psalms, as well as meditations, sermons,
and commentaries. Countless others turned to the psalms for inspiration,
consolation, entertainment, and edification, in the spirit of Richard
Hooker's question, "What is there necessarie for man to know which the
Psalmes are not able to teach?"2 No book was read in this period more
widely or deeply than the Bible, and of the many biblical books, none was
better known or more influential than the Psalms, especially for poets, since,
as Hooker put it, "The choice and flower of all thinges profitable in other
bookes [of scripture] the psalmes doe expresse, by reason of that poeticall
forme wherewith they are written."3 The entire Psalter was read through
each month in the worship services of the English Church, at which, by or-
der of the Elizabethan Act of Uniformity (1559), attendance was
compulsory. Of the Psalms, none was more widely read, quoted, translated,
paraphrased,and alluded to than Psalm 137.
The history of the interpretation of this biblical lyric - here unavoid-
ably partial, since the influence of the psalm was confined by neither
national nor period boundaries4 - provides a case study of the ways in
which the Bible was made meaningful to its sixteenth- and seventeenth-cen-
tury readers, or rather of the ways in which they, many of them writers,
made it meaningful by a process of creative interpretation analogous to the
imaginative commentaries of Jewish Midrash. James Kugel has recently ar-
gued that to understand a biblical culture (and this holds true of post-
Reformation England as of ancient Israel)scholars must read not just the Bi-
ble, the relatively stable literary document that sits on the desk or library
shelf, but the "interpreted Bible," the Bible as it was read, understood, and
2Hooker,150.
3Ibid.Clearlyit is the literaryqualityof the Psalms,theirpoweras poetry,that Hooker
seesas decisive.
4Thefocus of this studyis Psalm137 in England,but similarstudiescould be done for
other countries.See, for instance,Di Mauroand Creel. For evidenceof the popularityof
Psalm137 amongFrenchpoets,seethe 1606 Parispublicationof Frenchparaphrases of Psalm
137 by ClementMarot,PhilippeDesportes,JacquesDavy Du Perron,GuillaumeDu Vair,
AntoineNerveze,andothers(citedin Cave,97, n. 1). The psalmalsocontinuedto drawpoets,
amongothers,long afterthe seventeenthcentury.Fora few examplesamongmany:Christo-
pherSmartwrotea bold paraphrase of the psalm,LordByronparaphrased it twice, Heinrich
Heine's"Jehudaben Halevy"is a powerfulpoetic responseto its expressionof exiledlonging
for revenge,the FinnishcomposerJeanSibeliusset to musica paraphrase by the poet Hjalmar
Procope,andJohn Hollander'spoem "Kinneret" is an extendedmeditationon the psalm.
226 RENAISSANCE QUARTERLY
applied by its early readers.5To some extent, this "interpretedBible" remains

as inaccessible as its long-dead interpreters, but some of these interpreters
were also writers of translations, paraphrases,commentaries, sermons, or al-
lusive poems and plays. In these documents their interpretationssurvive. By
gathering enough of them together, and focusing on one short but crucial
biblical text, it is possible to reconstruct if not exactly a history then at least
an anthology of informative anecdotes that comes close to recapturing the
"interpretedPsalm 137."
STREAMS AND TEARS
"Bythe watersofBabylonwesat downeand weapte."6
This opening verse marks Psalm 137 as a lament, expressing the grief of the
Israelites over the fall of Jerusalem in the sixth century B.C.E., after they
were led away captive to Babylon. The riversidesetting of the psalm was felt
to be appropriate to its subject, and Renaissance translatorsoften exploited
the close connection between the two streams of water, the river and the
tears of the weeping Jews. The usual reading, explicit in the psalm itself, was
that the tears were triggered by memory (we wept "when we remembred
Zion" in the King James Version), with the parallel between flowing tears
and flowing streams an accidental, if fortuitous, one. Francis Bacon, for ex-
ample, begins with the Jews sitting "sadand desolate" beside the river.At the
end of his second stanza the "streamof tears"that bursts forth from the eyes
of the exiles seems to match and respond to the stream on whose banks they
sit.7 Some versions of the psalm link the waters more closely, as does Francis
Davison's, whose mourners "with their streames his [Euphrates'] streame
augmented," or Thomas Carew's,in which the weepers "filde the tyde" with
their tears.8The idea for this pouring of water into water might easily occur
to many poets independently, but the Countess of Pembroke seems to have
been the first to exploit it. In her version, the river "watrethBabells thanck-
full plaine" and the "tearesin pearled rowes"augment the "waterwith their
5Kugel,1997, xv.
6Ps. 137:1, in Coverdale'stranslationfrom the GreatBible (1539). Unless otherwise
noted, all citationsof psalmsfromthe majorBibletranslationsarefromWright.
7Bacon,284-85. Publishedin 1625, Bacon'spsalmswerededicatedto GeorgeHerbert.
8Davison,424. Davison'spsalmswerenot published(the principalsourceis Harleian
Manuscriptno. 6930 in the BritishLibrary),but his Psalm137 is includedin Grierson'sed.
of Donne, to whom it was for manyyearsattributed.Carew,149. Like Davison's,Carew's
psalmswere not publishedduringhis lifetime. His Psalm 137 was set to music by Henry
Lawesand printedin the 1655 SelectPsalmsof a New Translation. See Spink,2000, 126-29,
raine."9The thankfulness of the plain here is a curious addition, especially

with the use of "raine,"which suggests God's equable raining "on the just
and on the unjust" (Matt. 5:45). We hardly expect the tears of the exiles to
be figured as bounty nourishing the land of Babylon, but perhaps this is to
be read bitterly as a form of exploitation.
More in keeping with the conventional conception of the antagonistic
relationship between Israel and Babylon, though singular in its representa-
tion of it, is Sir John Oldham's greatly expanded paraphrase,where the "vast
Store" of the tears "increast the neighb'ring Tide." In the poem's opening
lines the "great Euphrates" is said with its "mighty current" to "confine"
Babylon "in watry limits."1?The implications here seem to fit better what
we expect the feelings of the Jews to be toward Babylon, and the metaphor,
in effect, inverts the captor-captive relationship of the two, the Jews' tears
serving not to water the thirsty Babylonian ground but to increase the walls
of its natural confines, to bind it in. In John Saltmarsh's"Meditation I," on
Ps. 137:1, the relationship between the tears and the streams is one of open
contest:
... oh how yourfountainsgentlyvies
With rivers,teareswith waves,as if thesedrops
Meantto outrunnethine, Babylon!1'
Saltmarsh'sinterpretation, like Oldham's, seems to suit the feelings of the ex-
iles better than the Countess of Pembroke's.
The notion of superfluity (perhaps suggested by a bilingual pun on the
familiar opening of the psalm in the Vulgate, superflumina), is highlighted
in several versions, with both the river and the tears bursting their banks.
This seems to be what George Wither had in mind when he described the
mourners "overcharg'dwith weepings," as also Richard Crashaw, when he
wrote that "Harpes and hearts were drown'd in Teares"(which matches and
and also the 1984 recordingby Anthony Rooley and The Consort of Musicke(Hyperion
CDA66135). In his programnote to the Hyperionrecording,CliffordBartlettarguesthat
the 1655 SelectPsalmes(whichalsoincludedpsalmtranslationsby GeorgeSandys)wasa Roy-
alistpamphlet,markedby the prominentplaceof the Psalmof Exileat the beginningof the
selection.
9Pembroke,231.
'0Oldham,140. Oldhamdatesthis paraphrase "December22. 1676. at Bedington."
"
Saltmarsh,1. Saltmarsh(c.1610-47) was a parliamentary chaplainand the authorof
mysticalreligiousworks aswell as the Poemata
Sacra(1636). The italicshereandin all further
citationsareoriginal.
parallels "great Euphrates flood" in his first stanza).12John Norris' para-

phrase is more sophisticated in its use of this figure of flooding, blending the
tears and the river together so that we cannot quite tell whether the flood is
literal or figurative:
Beneatha reverendgloomyshade
Where Tigrisand Euphrates cut theirway,
With foldedarmsand headsupinelylaid
We sate,andwept out all the tediousday,
Within its Banksgriefcould not be
Contain'd,when, Sion,we remember'd thee.13
The grief of the Jews is described as a river bursting its banks, like the one
beside which they sit. Or perhaps the Babylonian rivernot only sympathizes
with but, through an unusual emblematic metonymy, actually becomes the
grief of the exiles. More complex still is Edmund Elys' freer treatment of the
psalm in his Dia Poemata (1655), in which the river (or "rivets,"as it is here)
is put forward as an alternativesource of music, and a music more appropri-
ate to the Exile than the "light mirth" of actual songs:
These rivetsyield us the fitt'stmusick:we
Accounttheirmurmuresour bestharmony:
In them the Emblemeof our fateappears:
Their murmuresshow our groans,theirstreamsour tears.'4
Once again the streams of the river are linked to those of the mourners'
weeping eyes, the former representingthe latter as an "Embleme."The "har-
mony" referred to is only in part the actual audible "music" of the
murmuring stream. More importantly, it is the inaudible harmony of a sym-
pathetic "agreement of feeling or sentiment" (OED 2) or even of a more
profound correspondence between different elements in nature, the "har-
mony" between the riverand the Israelitespartaking in small measure of the
musicamundana, that "harmony"of mathematical proportion, described by
Boethius, which knits all creation together.15
12Crashaw,104-05. Page referenceswill not be given for complete psalters (as Wither's),
since psalm numbers alone should be sufficient. Editions cited are in the bibliography.
Wither (1588-1667), was an extraordinarily prolific poet and the author of A Preparationto
the Psalter (1619). He was eager to supplant the "Sternhold and Hopkins" psalter with his im-
proved version, but the failure of this plan is marked by the obscure publication of The Psalms
of David in the Netherlands in 1632.
13Norris, 325. Norris (1657-1711) was a poet and philosopher (last of the Cambridge
Platonists) and rector of Bemerton (George Herbert's former parish) from 1691.
'4Elys, fol. C4. Elys (born c. 1634) was an Oxford MA and a clergyman, friendly with
the Quakers.
'5For an extended treatment of this "music," see Hollander, 1961, 20-51, and Palisca,
161-90.
The tears of this lament suggested to several Renaissance poets another

biblical scene of weeping, that of the personified Jerusalemin Lamentations,
the widow who "weepeth sore in the night" (Lam. 1:2, KJV). The connec-
tion between the two passagesis obvious enough, apart from verbal parallels,
since they are both laments on the Babylonian Exile. Psalm 137, in which
the exiled Jews weep on remembering Jerusalem before its fall, relates pow-
erfully to Lamentations, in which it is the fallen Jerusalem herself who
weeps, mourning the loss of her exiled children. Moreover, in Lamentations,
as in the psalm, the mourning is triggered by memory: "Jerusalemremem-
bered in the days of her affliction and of her miseries all her pleasant things
that she had in the days of old" (Lam. 1:7, KJV). For readerswho hear the
echo of Lamentations 1:4,16 this intertextual relationship is signalled in
some translations by the striking use of the word "desolate,"as in those of
Bacon ("When as we sat all sad and desolate") and Davison, in whose ver-
sion the Jews hang up their harps:
When, pooreSyonsdolefullstate,
Desolate;
Sacked,burnedand inthrall'd,
And the Templespoil'd,whichwee
Ne'rshouldsee,
To our mirthlessemindeswee call'd.17
The Widow of Lamentations may also lie behind the figure of Mother Jerus-
alem in George Sandys' translation ("When I forget thee, my dear mother")
and, by implication, in Crashaw's("They, they that have snatcht us from our
Countries brest").18She is realizedvisually in FrancisQuarles' emblem of Ps.
137: 4 with its image of a woman sitting beside a river (Fig.1). The woman
is a version of the feminine Anima so familiar from religious emblems, but
Quarles complicates the figure in his poem. First, he confirms that this
"woman" represents the earth-bound soul, a "pilgrim and a pris'ner," an
"unransomed stranger/ In this strange climate."19This notion seems to be
16"... allhergatesaredesolate"
in theKJV.
'7Bacon,284;Davison,424. Davison's useis of coursethemorestriking of thetwo,the
sharplinebreakveryeffectivelyfiguringthedesolation of Zionin theisolationof theword
itself.
18Crashaw, 105.GeorgeSandys(1578-1644)wasa famoustraveler to theEastandthe
translator
of Ovid'sMetamorphoses(oftendescribed asoneof thefirstliterary
worksproduced
inAmerica, whereSandyswasforsomeyearsTreasurer of theVirginiaCompany) aswellas
the translatorof the 1636 Paraphrase
uponthePsalmesof David, widelyadmiredby contem-
porariesfor its literarymerit.
242. Thoughhe alsowroteotherverse,Quarles(1592-1644)wasthemost
'9Quarles,
popularandinfluential
of theEnglishemblematists.
HisEmblemes (1635)andHieroglyphikes
oftheLifeofMan(1638)continuedto be reprinted withratherpoorversionsof
(sometimes
theimages)intothenineteenth
century.
1M4 EMBLEME S
x v.
B2o -. shall
wa e in rolg e
ar j-
e td717a i an
Fhc
*V i 7L a/ *
FIGURE1: EmblemXV, book 4, FrancisQuarles,Emblemes, London, 1635.

BeineckeRareBook and ManuscriptLibrary,YaleUniversity.
derived from Augustine's allegorical reading of the psalm, which applies the
"strangerin a strange land" topos to the heavenward-yearning of a soul in
earthly exile.20Quarles then reconfiguresthe symbolism in terms of the clas-
sical myth of Orpheus and Eurydice:
Ah! If my voice could, Orpheus-like,unspel
My poor Euridice,my soul, fromhell
Of earth'smisconstruedHeav'n.. ..21
The woman is thus Anima (the soul) and Euridice (in the sense that the soul
is captive in "hell"on earth), but she is also the widow from Lamentations,
transposed to the riverside scene of the psalm.22 Quarles' "pilgrim and a
pris'ner too" sings from "hell-black dungeons," just as the singer of Lamen-
tations calls upon the Lord "out of the low dungeon" (Lam. 3:55, KJV), and
the ravens, wolves, and owls of Quarles' "vast desert" match the desolate
Zion roamed by foxes (Lam. 5:18) and the bears, lions, ostriches, and sea
monsters mentioned elsewhere in the book (3:10, 4:3).23
A bolder use of the weeping woman, linking Psalm 137 and Lamenta-
tions, is found in Edmund Spenser's The Ruines of Time, partly an elegy for
Sir Philip Sidney, in which the subject of the first section is that condition of
exile from the classical past (in this case, of Rome) which was so fundamen-
tal to the Renaissance.24Here, though, the woman is a demonic parody of
her biblical original. The connection to Psalm 137 and Lamentations 1-2 is
made clear by several allusions, but Verlame, the lamenting, personified
woman-city of Spenser'spoem, is not a version of Jerusalemor Jerusalem-in-
exile but rather a version of what the psalmist looks forward to, that is, an
eye-for-an-eye reduction of Babylon (and Edom) to the ruinous state in
which it has left Jerusalem.25This is especially appropriatefor Spenser,since
for late sixteenth-century Protestants "Babylon,"in Psalm 137 and Lamen-
20Augustine, readsthepsalmin termsof hisconceptof "two

1857, 158-77.Augustine
cities":
Jerusalem,thesoul'sheavenly
home,andBabylon,itsearthlyexile.A lengthypassage
fromAugustineis includedin Quarles'emblem,afterthe poem,on the contrastbetween
thosewhopraiseGodfromearthlyexileandthosefortunate enoughto beableto praisehim
in heaven"faceto face."
21Quarles,242.
22Asif theemblemwerenot denseenough,thewomanis alsoa typeof Job,facedby
threevenerablemenin robesandturbans(standingforEliphaz,Bildar,andZophar),who
seemto be offeringconsolation;
shereplies,in thepoem'sopeningline,"Urgemeno more."
23Quarles,242.
24Theechoesof Psalm137arenotedbyBraden, 27, andManley,168-79.SeealsoCart-
mell,77-82.
25AsCartmellnotes,thevisionof thefallof Babylonin Rev.18:2 is alsoimportant
for
thispassage.
tations, as in Revelation, had come to stand for Catholic Rome, and, despite
the initial allusive parallelto Jerusalem,it is Rome for which Verlamestands,
both as the ancient classical city and the contemporary papal one.26
The poet, "beside the shore/ Of silver streaming Thamesis,"thinks of
Verlame, the ancient city of Roman Britain which once stood there, but "Of
which there now remaines no memorie," the ultimate revenge in the context
of Psalm 137 where the psalmist struggles to retain memory of Jerusalem.27
Across the river,he sees the forgotten city personified, "AWoman sitting sor-
rowfullie wailing," her eyes weeping "streamesof teares"as she proceeds to
tell her story.28Here the figures of Psalm 137 and Lamentations 1-2 are
combined and inverted. The poem contains other ironies, such as the disap-
pearance of the Thames from the vicinity of the town, which Verlame
attributes to "greatgriefe."29In the tradition of translatingand paraphrasing
Psalm 137, however, the sympathetic grief of the riveris consistently figured
by images of flooding, mirroring the exiles' tears, not by drying up, which
would suggest the absence of weeping and the river's abandonment of
Verlame.
Perhaps because its riverside setting appealed to the Thames-fixated
Spenser, echoes of Psalm 137 seem to haunt his poetry. No. 8 of the em-
blems in A Theatrefor Worldlingsshows "Hard by a rivers side, a wailing
Nimphe," a personification of Rome much like Verlame.30 Even Colin
Clout's hanging up of his pipe at the end of The ShepheardesCalendarmay
be a transposition from biblical to pastoralelegy of the gesture of the Jewish
harpersfrom Psalm 137.31PatriciaParkerhas pointed out, furthermore, that
the Israelites' harps (sometimes translated as "instruments") hanging on
26Ofcourse,as Kugelshows, even first-centuryJewsinterpreted"Babylon"as Rome,
readingthe psalmas prefiguringthe destructionof the SecondTemple(1994, 173-74). For
one influentialworkingout of the Rome-Babylonfigurein Protestantterms, see Luther's
anti-papaltract,On theBabylonianCaptivityof theChurch.Indeed,LutherquotesPsalm137
in this context, followedby a puzzlingcurse- "Maythe Lordcursethe barrenwillowsof
thosestreams!" - whichmay be explainedas an allusionto Christ'scursingof the barrenfig
treein Matthew20, interpretedthroughone of Augustine'speculiarallegorizations fromhis
commentary on Psalm 137 (Luther was, afterall, an friar).
Augustinian Augustineinterprets
the willowsof Ps. 137:2 as men "thoroughlybad,"so barrenof "truefaith and good works"
that they arebeyondhope. Of course,in the context of the crucialReformationdebateon
faithversusworks,Luther'sreadingof Augustinewould obviouslyemphasizethe former.See
Luther,209, andAugustine,1857, 163.
27Spenser,232 (Ruinesof Time,lines 1-2, 4). On memory,see below.
28Ibid.,233 (lines9, 12).
29Ibid.,239 (line 141).
30Ibid.,477.
31Ibid., 208 line 141, "Herewill I hang my pype upon this tree").
("November,"
Babyloniantreesalso lie behind the suspended,and impotent,weaponsof

the knightVerdant- "Hiswarlikearmes,the idle instruments/Of sleeping
praise,werehong upon a tree"- the victim of the EnchantressAcrasiain
book2 of TheFaerieQueene.32 This Psalmwasobviouslyone with a singular
resonancefor Spenser.
HARP MUSIC
"Wehanged
ourharpes in themiddes
uponthewillowes 33
thereof.:
Perhapsthe most memorableimagein this psalmis the hangingof the harps

on the treesnearthe river.However,despitethe vividnessof this figurein
the collectivememoryof Englishpoetry,thereis some disagreementabout
what preciselythese instrumentswere.The most common Englishrender-
ing of the Hebrewkinnor(an instrumentsomethinglike a lyre)34is "harps,"
but confusionpersistsdue to the Vulgate'suse of organa,a generictermfor
"instruments" that has even been renderedoccasionallyas the English"or-
gan"- a rathercumbersomething to hang on a tree,even in the medieval
portativeform.Jeromehimselfdecidedagainstorganain his retranslation of
to
the Psalterfromthe Hebrew,shifting citharas, and this was also the trans-
lationusedin the ProtestantLatinBibleof JuniusandTremellius.35 Someof
the Englishtranslatorshedgedtheirbets, like WilliamWhittingham,who,
for the "Sternholdand Hopkins"psalter,translatedthe word as the pair,
"harps& instruments."36 This pairingwas also used by William Bartonin
his mid-seventeenthcenturypsalter,while MatthewParker's has the equally
ambivalent,but more and
awkward,"Harpes Organs." The engraverof the
frontispieceto JeremyTaylor's1644 Psalterof David (Fig.2) offeredan even
widerrangeof instruments.On eitherside of the penitentialKingDavidare
32Faerie Queene,2.12.80, cited in Parker,55-66. On the translationof the instruments,

see below.
33Ps.137:2, GenevaBible(1560).
34SeeSachs,106-08, andWerner.
35SeeJerome'stwo versionsin Lefevred'ltaples, and the Bibliorumparstertia... trans-
lated by Junius and Tremellius.Citharawas, moreover,the term favouredby the Greek
translatorsof the Septuagintin theirrenderingof kinnor.Sachsconcludesthatthe kinnorand
citharaweresimilar,smallroundedlyreswith stringssuspendedfroma horizontalcrossbar.As
he notes, the Egyptiansusedthe relatedterm,k.nn.r for a lyreof this sort (107).
36Thepropertitle of "Sternholdand Hopkins"is TheWholeBookeofPsalmes.This was
the most widely known metricalversionof the Psalmsin England,being publishedin over
700 editionsbetween 1562 and 1696. Fora studyof the peculiarand impressivepopularity
of this psalter,see Hamlin.
t..~aia a....
* ,t ?-
.ii. lai .i $te. x .
1!1
FIGURE2: Frontpiece to JeremyTaylor,ThePsalterof David, Oxford, 1644. Bei-

neckeRareBook and ManuscriptLibrary.
the familiar harps hanging in the trees, signaling a visual allusion to Psalm
137, but the artist also includes lutes, a viol, a cornett, and a trumpet.37
Accuracy of translation was not, of course, the only factor in the selec-
tion of instruments. Other poets, notably the emblematists, envisioned the
harps as various members of the string family. In a typically Renaissancesyn-
cretism, they often melded the biblical characters and narratives with
apparentlyanalogous ones in classical mythology. Two frequently-linked fig-
ures were David, inspired by God, chanting psalms to the strains of his harp,
and Orpheus, inspired by the muses, singing odes and hymns to the accom-
paniment of his lyre. In the Renaissance, especially after the late-sixteenth-
century vogue for the lute-song, English poets transformed Orpheus' lyre
into a lute, and his songs into ayres.38Francis Quarles' emblem of Psalm
137, as mentioned above, pictures a woman by a riverbank, holding a lute,
which she appears to be putting away from herself. Confirming the meta-
morphosis from harp to lute, the poem begins:
Urge me no more:this airymirthbelongs
To bettertimes:thesetimes arenot for songs.
The sprightlytwangof the melodiouslute
Agreesnot with my voice ... .39
The lute and its songs are rejected, and the implication seems to be that the
rejection is partly on generic grounds. Mirth is "airy"in its lightness, inap-
propriate for the poet's heavy mood, but it is also perhaps "ayrey,"in that it
belongs to the "ayre"or lute-song. In any case, the shift from harp to lute al-
lows Quarles to include in his dismissal the musical recreations familiar to
his Caroline readers.
In Edmund Arwaker'sPia desideria,on the other hand, there is a whole
consort of instruments, all rejected. The first he mentions is the "warbling
Lyre,"which the poet's posited "Friends"(his interlocutors in this imaginary
dialogue) suggest is most appropriate for dispelling grief.4 Then follows an
excursus on the power of music to lift the spirits, using the examples of sail-
37Fordrawingmy attentionto this image(imagesof David and hangingharpsaresur-
scarce),I amindebtedto PaulaLoscocco.
prisingly Fora moredetailedstudyof theimageof
hung-up davidicharps from 1649-60, see her forthcoming Eikonoklastic
Song:Miltonand
Poetics.
Royalist
380n thehistoryof thelute-song, seeSpink,1974,esp.chaps.1 and2. Fora detailed
studyof the use of the cluster
lute-harp-lyre in representationsof musicin Englishpoetry,
1500-1700,seeHollander, 1961,43-51, 128-45andpassim.
39Quarles, 241.
40Arwaker, 151-52.Arwaker's verseis "Englished"fromtheLatinemblembookof Her-
manHugo(1588-1629),Piadesideria emblematis elegiisetaffectibus
(Antwerp,1624),which
alsoprovided theimagesforArwaker's version.
ors, shepherds, travellers,and soldiers, and the music of viols, the lute, the
pipe, and the harp. The psalm is followed only loosely by Arwaker; he de-
scribes a more general condition of grief - a kind of emotional exile - at
being "Fortune'swounded Captive." Once an accomplished musician who
"Cou'dwith IsraelssweetestSingervie," his ability is now lost. The poet here
notes that if he were to sing, in his reduced state, "'twou'dbe/ Some doleful
Emblem of my misery."41When, in exile, he thinks on his "lov'dCountry,"
the result is that his "Lute,"his "Voice,"and his "Mind" all "lose their har-
mony."42 Arwaker uses "harmony," as Elys did, in the sense of musical
concord and also in the more abstractsense of concord between elements of
the self, what for Boethius and subsequent theorists of musica speculativa
was termed musica humana, the smaller-scale human equivalent of musica
mundana.43
If, to various interpretive ends, authors have altered the instrument
hung up by the Israelites,they have also, for similar reasons, altered its con-
dition. Nothing is said of the instruments in the Hebrew psalm (or the
Vulgate or English Bibles) beyond their location in the trees, but the metri-
cal translators and emblematists could not resist elaborating, usually to
emphasize the sympathetic connection between the instruments and their
owners. Most simply, the harps are "silent"(James I/Sir William Alexander,
G. Sandys), "mute"(Davison), or "dumbe"(Carew), the figurative point of
these adjectives being made explicit in the version of Sir John Denham:44
Our Harps,to whichwe latelysang,
Mute as ourselves,on Willowshang.
Oldham is similarly direct, with harps "asmute and dumb as we," and Nor-
ris' harps are "sad,as well as we."45
Many of the poets are then drawn to say something of the strings of
the instrument. Davison's harps are also "unstrung,"as are George Sandys',
4'The descriptionof the sceneas "emblem"may derivefromElysor it may simplyhave

become a commonplace,especiallyafterQuarles.Saltmarshalso calls the hanging of the
harpsan "embleme."
42Arwaker,151-54. All italicsoriginal.
43Theimportancefor Medievaland Renaissancemusic theoryof the tripartitedivision
of music in Boethius'De InstitutioneMusicais discussedin Hollander,1961, 24-26. I use
these termsthroughoutfor convenienceand consistency,recognizingthat the conceptsso
designatedmay have been differentlynamedby some sixteenth-and seventeenth-century
writers.
44Davison,424; Carew,149.
45Oldham,140; Norris,325.
Carew's,and Henry King's.46The point of the unstringing may lie in an im-

plicit and commonplace Latin pun on corlchorda,linking strings and hearts,
the source of the English idiom "heartstrings."This buried pun is made ex-
plicit in Phineas Fletcher's paraphrase, when the Israelites respond to the
Babylonian request to "Takedown your harps, and string them":
Wereour harpswell tun'din everystring,
Our heart-stringsbroken,
Throatsdrown'dand soken
With tearsand sighs,how canwe praiseand sing
The Kingof heav'nunderan heathenking?47
Once again, the point of the wordplay is to emphasize sympathy between
the exiles and their harps (and also, of course, the river,in the "drown'dand
soken" throats which play on the "streams-tears"motif). Oldham's para-
phrase makes the point clear:
Our Harps,as mute and dumb aswe,
Hung uselessand neglectedby,
And now and then a brokenStringwould lend a Sigh,
As if with us they felt a Sympathy,
And mourn'dtheirown and our Captivity.48
This passage also seems to invoke (as the others may in more veiled fashion)
the Aeolian harp. This instrument, "played"by the wind as it blows across
the strings, was, in its modern form, invented by Athanasius Kircher in the
seventeenth century, and popularized by poets from James Thomson to the
Romantics (for whom it was a potent symbol), but its actual origins are
much earlier.49In fact, a legend recorded in the Babylonian Talmud records
that David used to hang his harp (kinnor) over his bed, and was woken in
the night to the sound of the wind blowing through its strings, whereupon,
inspired by that music, he would compose psalms.50So the notion, if not the
name, of the "Aeolianharp" is linked from antiquity with the instrument of
the psalmist. The OED does not record a use of the word "sympathy"in the
47Fletcher,253. Fletcher(1582-1650), like his brotherGiles, was one of the "Spense-
rian"poets. His six metricalpsalmswereincludedin the Miscellaniesappendedto ThePurple
Island(1633)
48Oldham,140.
49SeeSachs,402-03.
50See TheHebrew-English
Editionof theBabylonianTalmud,chap. I, 3b. I owe this ref-
erenceto John Hollander.
sense of "sympatheticvibration" until the nineteenth century, but that cer-

tainly seems to be one of the senses of the word in this passage from
Oldham, used as a figure for the emotional sympathy of the familiarpathetic
fallacy.51
Some poets were particularly drawn to the subject of music in Psalm
137, often playing with familiar musical puns, as in, for example, Salt-
marsh'sfirst meditation:
No stops
In this sad Musick?how thesemournersseem,
As thoughtheywept divisionwith thy stream!52
These are relatively commonplace puns but interesting nevertheless.53The
term "stops"can refer to the stopping of a lute string to produce a pitch, as
well as, perhaps, a rank of organ pipes or a set of jacks on a harpsichord (the
latter less likely without specific referenceto keyboard instruments). It may
also suggest, as well as non-musical cessation, a break or "rest"in the music.
Musical and non-musical meanings also converge in "division,"which refers
to musical variation, usually above a ground bass, but also to a descant above
a melody, as well as to the less specialized sense of"separation" or even "dis-
agreement"or "conflict"(in keeping with the "vying"between the "tearsand
waves" several lines further on). Interestingly,Saltmarsh'stwo puns work in
opposite directions. In the first case, given the context - why are you weep-
ing so much? - "stops"means primarily"cessation,"and the musical senses
are secondary. In the second, though it is used metaphorically, "division"
means primarily "musicalvariation," the weeping of the mourners "played"
to the accompaniment of the stream. This time the more familiar non-mu-
sical sense is secondary, perhaps occurring even only in retrospect after
Saltmarshlater introduces the note of competition between the weepers and
the river.
5'Thephenomenon
of sympathetic
vibrationwouldhavebeenfamiliarto anystring
player,as evidencedby JacobCats'emblem of love as sympatheticvibrationbetweentwo
lutes,reproduced
identically-tuned in Hollander, 1961,between242 and243. Foran En-
glishexample,seeWalton, 41, "And,though 'tismostcertain,thattwoLutes,beingboth
strungandtun'dto anequalpitch,andthen,oneplaidupon,theother,thatis nottotcht,be-
inglaiduponaTableata fitdistance,will(likeanEcchoto a trumpet) warblea faintaudible
harmony,in answerto thesametune...."
1 (italicsadded).
52Saltmarsh,
53See
Hollander, 1961,134and139,forinstance, quotingSirJohnDavies'punningon
and
"Stoppes" Sidney's on "divisions,"
respectively.
One version of Psalm 137 which offers a particularlyelaborate develop-

ment of the musical motif is the lute-song "Asby the streames of Babilon"by
England's only notable poet-composer, Thomas Campion. His translation
of Psalm 137 appears in the first of his TwoBookesofAyres(c. 1612-13), the
one containing "Divine and Morall Songs,"which also included his version
of Psalm 130 ("Out of my soules deapth to thee"). Campion's translation is
highly compressed, but by using a dense pun, playing an English word
against its Latin root, he is able to achieve much in little space. The pun oc-
curs in the lines describing the harps:
Aloft the treesthat springup there
Our silent Harpswee pensivehung ....54
The wordplay here depends upon the etymology for "pensive"in the Latin
root, pendeo/pendereor "to hang" (Lewis and Short, A Latin Dictionary, s.v.
pendeo I.B.1).55 The Latin word can also mean "to be suspended, inter-
rupted, discontinued" (Lewis and Short II.C) as well as "to be in suspense,
to be uncertain, doubtful, irresolute, perplexed" (Lewis and Short II.E),
which corresponds to the principal English sense of "pensive"(OED 1 "Full
of thought; plunged in thought; thoughtful, meditative, musing; reflective:
often with some tinge of seriousness or melancholy"). The immediate ety-
mology of "pensive"is actually from the Frenchpenser,meaning simply "to
think," but Campion's play against the ultimate Latin etymon allows him to
combine the physical situation of the harps with the mental state of the cap-
tive Jews in a complex figure of sympathy or "harmony."The complexity lies
partly in a ratherMiltonic syntactic ambiguity (deriving from Latin syntax),
which allows "pensive"to modify either, or both, of the two words which it
follows, "Harps" and "wee." Strictly speaking, the harps and the exiles are
"pensive"in different ways, the former in the Latin sense of "hanging" and
the latter in the English (and French) sense of "thoughtful," but the senses
blend together and Campion's harps are also "pensive"in the same way that
Norris' are "sad,"sharing the mental state of their owners.56
54Campion,74.
55Thispunis notedin Hollander,
1975,80.
56Itshouldbe notedthatEdwinSandys(parliamentarian,
sonof theArchbishop of the
samename,andelderbrotherof George,themorefamoustranslator of psalms)alsouses
"pensive" in his paraphrase
of Psalm137,butwithoutthecomplexity
of Campion's word-
play:"Ah,Sionswrongsto pensivemindsappear.. ." SinceSandys'Sacredhymnswas
published in 1615,however,he mayhaveborrowedthewordfromCampion's earlierpubli-
cationandhadsomesenseof thebilingual pun.
REMEMBERING AND FORGETTING

"IfIforgetthee,0 Ierusalem: let myrighthandforgethercunning.
If I doenot remember thee, let mytonguecleaveto the roofeof mymouth;
if IprefernotIerusalemabovemychiefeioy."57
Memory is at the heart of Psalm 137. The Jews struggle to keep alive their
memory of Jerusalemin exile in Babylon, and to this end the psalmist vows
that if he forgets Jerusalemhis right hand should "forgether cunning." Fur-
thermore, he prays to God to remember "the children of Edom" and their
role in the destruction of Jerusalem. He doesn't elaborate, but it seems clear
that this "remembering"is equivalent to vengeance and destruction: for God
to "remember"the Edomites is for him to cast their actions back on their
own heads. These verses were bound to appeal specifically to poets, for the
obvious reason that the "cunning"of the "righthand" - the psalmist'sabil-
ity to play-sing-write - is of paramount importance to a writer. Some
translators read the verse more narrowly, as does Matthew Parker (not, of
course, a poet), whose "I would my hand: went out of kinde:/ to play to
pleasurethem" calls for only a temporary lapse of skill to frustratethe Baby-
lonians' desire for entertainment. More characteristicis the general and total
forgetting called for in Edwin Sandys' paraphrase:
Let parchedtong to witheringpalatgrowe
And skilfulhandno morehis scienceknowe.58
The Latinate "science"here is also interesting, since it includes both specific
technical mastery and knowledge in the broadersense (OED 2b or perhaps
3d and 1). Crashaw'sparaphraseof this verse knits together music and mem-
ory so as to suggest that Jerusalemis the basis of the psalmist'smusic:
Ah theeJerusalem!ah soonermay
This handforgetthe mastery
Of Musicksdaintytouch, then I
The Musickeof thy memory.59
The central concern of Psalm 137 with memory, and the essential con-
nection between memory and poetry or song, may also lie behind Crashaw's
choice, as well as Fletcher's and Oldham's, to translate the psalm into the-
form of a Pindaric ode.60The analogy between Hebrew and Greek literary
57Ps.137:5-6, KJV(1611).
58E.Sandys,125.
105.
59Crashaw,
60Theformof theEnglishPindaric is usuallyonlylooselybasedon itsoriginal,
consist-
ingmainlyof a seriesof stanzasof irregular
linelengths.SeeFogleandFry.
forms, based always on an ignorance of the actual structure of Hebrew po-

etry, goes back at least to Jerome'squestion, "What is more musical than the
Psalter?which, in the manner of our Flaccus or of the Greek Pindar, now
flows in iambs, now rings with Alcaics, swells to a Sapphic measure or moves
along with a half-foot?"61Jerome'sauthority may lie behind Isaac Watts' re-
mark accompanying his own translation of Psalm 137, that "Had Horace or
Pindar written this Ode, it would have been the endless Admiration of the
Critick, and the perpetual Labour of Rival Translators."62But the connec-
tion between psalms and odes may be more basic. Both words derive from
Greek musical terms, "psalm"from psalmos,a song sung to a plucked instru-
ment, and "ode" from aeidein, to sing or chant. More importantly, the
origins of the English ode seem to lie in a sense of longing for the lost "pres-
ence of voice" - as it inhered in the Greek hymns and the Hebrew psalms
- which Paul Fry describes:
By imitatinghymnody... an ode revealsits conceptionof a hymn as a being-

presentto a transcendent,originaryvoice. The aim of the ode is to recoverand
usurpthe voice to whichhymnsdefer:not merelyto participatein the presence
but to be the voice.63
He writes further that
Likethe hymn, the ode or "hymnextempore"longs for participationin the di-
vine, but it never participates communally, never willingly supplies a
congregationwith common prayerbecauseit is bent on recoveringa priestly
role that is not pastoralbut hermetic.64
Fry is principally concerned with the Romantic ode and with a few of its
precursors in the seventeenth century (by Ben Jonson, Michael Drayton,
and John Milton), and the distance between hymn and ode, which the nine-
teenth-century poet longs to bridge, may be a common feature of these. For
Renaissance poets translating Psalm 137, however, there was no such dis-
tance, since the psalm is hymn and ode simultaneously. This may be part of
the reason so many seventeenth-century poets were drawn to the Psalms,
and to Psalm 137 in particular,since it expressesthe very problem which Fry
argues is basic to the ode: how can I sing the Lord's song in exile (cut off
from the "presenceof voice" essential to any notion of inspired poetry). By
writing the psalm as an ode, or, conversely, casting their odes in the form of
Psalm 137, the poets are able both to express the anxiety of loss and to re-
61From"Prefaceto Eusebius,"cited in Kugel,1981, 152.
62Watts,ReliquiaeJuveniles(1734), cited in Davie,211.
63Fry,9.
64Ibid.,7.
capture the "presenceof voice." This presence derives from the psalm'sstatus
as Scripture, all of which is conceived of as, to some degree, divinely in-
spired. The psalm also enables the recapturing of the "communal
participation" longed for (according to Fry) by later writers of odes, since
there is a residual echo of common prayerin the psalmist'smemory of tem-
ple worship, as well as a continuing connection between the psalms and the
liturgy due to their use in the Christian worship service.
The desire to reach back, to convert memory to presence so as to hear
and even to join in with the primal heavenly song is a frequent recurrencein
Milton's poetry.65One such recurrenceinvolves a brief but crucial allusion to
Psalm 137. In book 3 of ParadiseLost the heavenly choir of angels sings a
hymn of praise to the Father and the Son after the latter has offered to re-
deem the sin of Adam by sacrificing himself, "death for death."66As Diane
McColley points out, the song is a broad paraphraseof or extended allusion
to the TeDeum Laudamus.67The TeDeum itself incorporates several allu-
sions to the psalms in its final section, however, and it seems not to have
been remarkedthat Milton's "TeDeum" follows suit.68Milton's hymn closes
with an allusion to Ps. 137:5-6:
... thy Name
Shallbe the copiousmatterof my Song
Henceforth,and nevershallmy Harpthy praise
Forget,nor fromthy Father'spraisedisjoin.69
65Milton'sOde"OntheMorningof Christ's forinstance,

Nativity," givenitsownchap-
terin Fry'sstudy,is concernedwithmemoryandmusic.Whenthepoetcalls"Ringoutye
Crystalspheres" so that"Timewillrunback,andfetchtheageof gold,"he hasin minda
sceneof singing,"whenof oldthesonsof morningsung,/WhiletheCreator Great/Hiscon-
stellationsset"(seeMilton,46). The poemattemptsmorethana simplerecollection,
however. Milton'scallto theMuseto "preventthem[the"Star-led withthyhum-
Wizards"]
bleode,"whichis of courseMilton's ownfarfromhumbleone,uses"prevent" in a Latinate
senseofpraevenire,to comebefore(Milton,43).A moreradical temporal
displacementthan
mereremembering seemsto be implied.
6Milton,263 (PL.3.212).
67McColley 1994.Themostexplicitallusions areMilton's
"HeeHeav'nof Heavens and
allthePowerstherein(3.390)and"thydearandonlySon"(3.403)(seeMilton,267, 268).
The TeDeum,in Coverdale's English,has"TotheealAngelscryaloud,theheavensandall
thepowerstherein," and"Thyhonourable, true,andonelysonne"(FirstandSecond Prayer
Books,22, 23).
6The psalmversesalludedto in the TeDeumare28:9, 114:2,123:3,33:22,31:1and
71:1.SeeJulian,1120-21.Juliantracesallusionsto theVulgatein theLatinversionof the
hymn.
69Milton,268.
Like the psalmist, Milton vows never to forget his proper subject, the praise
of God (in this case figured by God's name rather than the name of Jerusa-
lem as in Psalm 137). Milton is setting himself up as a psalmist, and his
"hymn" as a psalm.70
The psalms are of course primarily praise-songs, as indicated by their
collective Hebrew title, tehillim, or "praises."The allusion to Psalm 137 in-
volves more, however, than simply a generic marking of Milton's inset poem.
In both the TeDeum and Milton's "hymn" there is a shift in voice between
first person plural and singular. The TeDeum begins with common prayer
("We") and ends with an individual petition, "O Lorde, in thee have I
trusted: let me never be confounded."71Milton's shifting pronouns are more
complicated, since they effectively blur the distinction between reported and
direct speech. He begins with the former, signalled by "firstthey sung," but
then shifts inexplicably to the latter, with "thy Name/ Shall be the copious
matter of my song," only to snap back to third person at the end ("Thus
they in Heav'n").72The point seems to be that Milton actually joins in the
heavenly choir at this point, or at least would like to.73This marks the cru-
cial difference between Milton's condition and that of the psalmist. While
the latter is writing in exile, Milton has, at least through his bold conceit,
come "home" in the most profound sense. The Augustinian reading of
Psalm 137 is implicit in this maneuver - the "exile"which Milton has over-
come in reaching back in time and up into heaven being that of the soul
from its home in the heavenly city. The other notable shift from the original
psalm that Milton works in his allusion is one of genre: the psalmist sings an
elegy, a lament for his state, and, anxious about the possibility of forgetting,
vows to remember Jerusalem, calling on God to make him "forget his skill"
if he forgets; Milton sings a hymn of praise in joy and confidence, without
any hint of the danger of forgetting either his best subject or his poetic skill.
70TheTeDeumsets itselfup in much the sameway,a patristichymn posingas a psalm,

both by meansof the allusionsto psalmsin its finalsectionand alsoin the myth of its spon-
taneousand inspiredcompositionby Ambroseand Augustineat the latter'sbaptismby the
former.See the article"Tedeum laudamus"in Julian.
71Firstand SecondPrayerBooks,22, 23.
72Milton,267, 268.
73Thisis much the samestrategyhe usesin "Ata SolemnMusick,"at the end of which
he looks forward"tillGod erelong/ To his celestialconsortus unite,/ To live with him, and
sing in endlessmornof light"(Milton,82). The firstdraftof this poem, rejectedprobablybe-
causeof its extremepresumption,endedwith "Tolive andsingwith him "ratherthan"Tolive
with him, and sing."Milton would like to be singingalongsideof God, but, at this stageof
his career,this seemsbrashevento him.
STRANGERS IN STRANGE LANDS

"HowshallwesyngetheLordessongein a straungelande?"74
The psalmist'sanxiety about the loss of memory is at the heart of Psalm 137,
and the source of this danger is the forced exile of the psalmist and his peo-
ple from their true home, which is another focus of interest for those
translating, paraphrasing,or alluding to this psalm (especially given the cul-
tural and spiritual alienation at the heart of both the Renaissance and
Reformation, movements of renewal and rebirthfounded on the rediscovery
and reappropriationof past cultures that remained to some extent irredeem-
ably lost).75 For those souls who, like Augustine, longed for their heavenly
home, it mattered little where they were on earth. William Loe's 1620 Songs
ofSion, for instance, a collection of metrical paraphrasesand meditations on
psalms and other scripture, was "set for the ioy of gods deere ones, who sitt
here by the brookes of this worlds Babel, & weepe when they thinke on
Hierusalem which is on highe."76Other writers felt a more earthly home-
sickness, however, for the obvious reason that many of them were actual
exiles from their home countries. Coverdale, Whittingham, and Crashaw
were all, for extended periods, living in exile on the continent, the first two
as a result of their Protestant beliefs at times when England was officially
Catholic, and the last, a Catholic among Protestants, for just the opposite
reason. Indeed, even Loe's sense of exile may have been more worldly than
his long-title suggests, since he was writing to those, like himself, "of the En-
glish nation residing at Hamborough [Hamburg]."77Even if not everyone
experienced physical exile, the fear of being forced to live in a foreign coun-
try, away from family, friends, and, especially, one's native language, was a
powerful one, powerfully expressed in the familiar psalm.
Alienation from the native language seems to have been a source of par-
ticular anxiety, as is implied in Henry King's translation of Ps. 137:4:
But how shallwe sing the LordsSong,
His Enemiesamong?
Or tune His Notes in strangersLand,
That cannotunderstand?
74Ps.137:4, Coverdale'sGreatBible,(1539).
75Onthe Renaissancehumanists'senseof alienationfromthe classicalcultureto which
they were drawn,see Greene,esp. chap. 2, "HistoricalSolitude;"on the alienationof six-
teenth-centuryReformersfromthe earlyChristianchurchandtheirattemptto overcomethis
alienationby writinga historyof the truechurchthroughthe MiddleAges,see Cameron.
7fLoe,sig. +4.
77Ibid.
The psalmist'sproblemhereseems not one of singing temple songs before

heathen Babyloniansas it is, for instance,in Campion'sayre("Isthen the
song of our God fit/ To be prophan'din a forraineland?"),but ratherof
singingto an audiencethatdoesn'tknowthe language.78 King'sfocuson lan-
guagemay derive from a traditionalconflationof Babylonand Babel,based
primarilyon the fact that the latteris the Hebrewname for the former.79
However,since the story of Babelin Genesis 11 concernsthe fall from an
originallinguisticunityto a confusionof tongues,manyinterpreters of later
biblicalreferencesto Babylonreadinto them the concernwith languageand
confusionof the etiologicalBabelaccount.Once again,this traditionmay
originatewith the typologicalreadinghabitsof Augustine,who recountsthe
story of the Fallof the toweras the earlyhistoryof Babylon:"Thatis why
the name'Confusion'wasgivento the city;becauseit washerethatthe Lord
confused the languagesof all the earth."80 The use of "Babel"ratherthan
"Babylon" in severaltranslations of Psalm 137 (the Countessof Pembroke's
quotedabove, Edwin and for
Sandys', Wither's, example)mayecho the early
"history"of the city in Genesis 11, though the disyllabicname may some-
times also just be a metricalconvenience.Fletcheris more explicit in his
paraphrase:
So shallthy towers
And all thy princelybowers,
Proud Babel, fall ....81
He not only adds the towersto the psalm'sBabyloniancityscape,but em-

phasizesprideas the sin whichwill bringabouttheirfall,just as it did in the
traditionalinterpretationof the Babelstory in Genesis.82Similarechoesof
the fallof Babeloccurin Davison("And,thou Babel,when the tide/ Of thy
pride")and Carew ("Sittingby the streamesthat Glide/ Downe Babells
Towringwall").83
7Campion, 74. Of course,whatthe Babylonianscannot"understand" probablyalsoin-

cludesthe cultureand the religiousbeliefsand practiceswhich go alongwith the language,
but the linguisticstrangenessseemsthe primarysensehere,fromwhich the othersderive.
79SeeHallo.
80Augustine,1972, 656. Forthe historyof Babel'sfall, see bk. 16, chaps.4-5.
81Fletcher,253.
82Thelanguagehereis similarto that of the angelannouncingthe fall of Babylonin the
section on the fall of Luciferin Fletcher'sPurpleIsland(1633): "Babel,proudBabel'sfall'n,
andlies as low as ground"(in Griersonand Bullough,217). In this case,thereis a furtherty-
pologicalextensionto the fallof Babylonin Revelation,which also recountsthe defeatof the
greatdragonSatan(12:9).
The Babel story'sfocus on language may also have been what suggested
to Shakespearethe appropriatenessof Psalm 137 as an expression of the En-
glishman's anxiety about living among those who don't know English. He
incorporates an allusion to the psalm at a key point in RichardII. In act 1,
scene 3, after Richard has banished him for life, Mowbray laments his sen-
tence in what amounts to an inset paraphraseof Psalm 137:
The languageI havelearntthesefortyyears,
My nativeEnglish,now I must forgo,
And now my tongue'suse is to me no more
Than an unstringedviol or a harp,
Or like a cunninginstrumentcas'dup-
Or beingopen, put into his hands
That knowsno touch to tune the harmony.
Within my mouthyou haveengaol'dmy tongue,
Doublyportcullis'dwith my teeth and lips,
And dull unfeelingbarrenignorance
Is mademy gaolerto attendon me.
I am too old to fawnupon a nurse,
Too farin yearsto be a pupil now:
What is thy sentencethen but speechlessdeath,
Which robsmy tonguefrombreathingnativebreath?84
The image of the unstrung harp to which Mowbray compares his "tongue"
in foreign exile is familiar from many translations of Ps. 137:4 (compare
George Sandys' "our silent harps, unstrung"). The "cunning instrument"
and the ignorant "hands"of the player allude to verse 5 (the Bishops Bible
version, "let my right hande forget her cunning"). The imprisonment of the
tongue behind "teeth and lips" derives from verse 6, "Let my tongue cleave
to the roof of my mouth" (in the Geneva Bible version which Shakespeare
most often used). Mowbray'slament is his own psalm of exile.
Psalm 137 seems to have been on Shakespeare'smind as he wrote Rich-
ard II, since he alludes to verse 6 again near the end of the play, when
Aumerle seeks Bolingbroke's forgiveness for his involvement in treasonous
plotting:
Forevermay my kneesgrowto the earth,
My tonguecleaveto my roofwithin my mouth,
Unlessa pardonere I riseor speak.
(5.3.29-31)85
31. Subsequent
84Shakespeare, citationsfromRichard
IIwillbe fromthisedition,and
act,sceneandlinenumbers willbegivenin thetext.
85Thisallusionis notedbybothShaheen(118)andNoble(158).
Richard II begins with the double banishment of Mowbray and Boling-

broke, and these images of exile may have suggested the relevance of Psalm
137 to Shakespeare, but he may also have felt it appropriate to the play's
largerconcerns with England as nation and homeland, the problems of good
and bad rule, and the effect of a bad king on the health of the realm. Rich-
ard's reign is presented as a kind of fall from Paradise, most famously in
Gaunt's prophesy of Richard's transformation of England's "blessed plot,"
the "otherEden, demi-paradise,"into "atenement or pelting farm" (2.1.50,
42, 60). (Interestingly, York's report of Gaunt's death shortly after this
speech contains another echo of Psalm 137: "His tongue is now a stringless
instrument" [2.1.149].) This "fall"of England is also representedin terms of
the fall of Jerusalem in act 1 scene 2, when Gloucester'swidow mourns her
fallen manor (Plashy, with its appropriately watery name), expressing her
own bereavement, and, by extension, that of the realm - all due to Rich-
ard'ssins:
Alack,and what shallgood old Yorktheresee
But emptylodgingsand unfurnish'd walls,
Unpeopled offices,untroddenstones,
And what hearthereforwelcomebut my groans?
Thereforecommendme; let him not come there
To seekout sorrowthat dwellseverywhere.
Desolate,desolate,will I henceand die:
The last leaveof thee takesmy weepingeye.
(1.2.67-74)
The Duchess is another version of the widow that "wepeth continually in
the night" in Lamentations, the ruined Jerusalem personified. The allusion
is here marked by the same key word from Lamentations (discussed above in
relation to Bacon'sand Davison's translations of Psalm 137): "Desolate, des-
olate."86As noted above, the linking of the laments for Jerusalem in Psalm
137 and Lamentations 1 was traditional. The England of RichardII, like the
biblical Jerusalem, is in ruins because of the sins of her people and, espe-
cially, her king. There is, furthermore, a sense that this ruin is a kind of exile
from itself, a condition of bondage imposed by the country's rightful king
(Northumberland refers to Richard'smisrule at 2.1.291 as a "slavishyoke,"
suggesting, with the psalm in mind, a "Babylonian"captivity). It is also in-
triguing, given the longing of the exiled psalmist for a return to Jerusalem,
that the new king, Bolingbroke, believes the complete restoration of the
kingdom requires a pilgrimage - to Jerusalem. He is ultimately unable to
make the journey and so passes the burden of atonement on to his son. Yet
86See Lam. 1:1-4, GenevaBible(1560).

he does die, in ironic fulfillment of prophecy, in the "JerusalemChamber"

of Westminster Abbey.
Like Shakespeare, many of his contemporaries also read Psalm 137 in
political terms, though in this period, as in that of the psalm'soriginal Jewish
readers, the "political" almost invariably included aspects of the religious.
Whittingham's translation, written in exile in Geneva during Mary's reign,
introduces a political note in verse 4 that was followed by many subsequent
translators:
Alas (saydwe) who can once frame,
his sorrowfullhartto syng:
The praysesof our lovingGod,
thus undera straungekyng?
In this case, the problem for the psalmist is not language or religion but the
king, though for Whittingham the problem with the "king" (Queen Mary)
was her religion. Similar terminology is used in the translation penned by
William Barton during the Interregnum. Barton's version is heavily in-
debted to the "Sternhold and Hopkins" psalter, but Whittingham's
emphasis on the "straungeking" would have appealed to the Puritan Barton
for obvious reasons, even though the two translatorshad different kings in
mind. Bacon'stranslation also includes a "foreignking," but his point seems
to be to contrast singing in exile on earth under an earthly, and therefore
"foreign,"king, with singing in Zion, the "seat and dwelling place" of the
true king, Jehovah ("Hierusalem, where God his throne hath set.")87
Fletcher renders this contrast more explicit:
With tearsand sighs,how canwe praiseand sing
The Kingof heav'nunderan heathenking?88
Norris' refusalto sing "to those who're aliens to our Heavenlyking" picks up
on the same motif but shifts the emphasis back from the political to the
religious.89
Another use of Psalm 137 as a song of primarily political exile is Ed-
mund Waller's, in his poem "To Sir William Davenant upon his first two
books of Gondibert,written in France."Waller, the translatorof at least one
psalm (104), converts the story of the exiled Israelitesinto one in which they
are simply unable to sing in a foreign country. By reversing it he is able to
give Davenant an original compliment:
87Bacon,285.
253.
s8Fletcher,
89Norris,326.
The droopingHebrewsbanish'dharpsunstrung
At Babylon,upon the willowshung;
Yourssoundsaloud,and tell'sus you excell
No less in Courage,than in Singingwell
Whilst unconcern'd you let your Countryknow,
They haveimpoverishedthemselves,not you.90
There is no suggestion in this thoroughly secular retelling of the psalm that
the "Hebrews" were silent by choice and for religious principles; they are
represented as simply unable to sing abroad. Davenant is the more remark-
able, since he can sing even in exile. Of course, the comparison cannot bear
much scrutiny since, as Waller implies, Davenant was banished by his coun-
try not justfrom it. Waller's curse a few lines further along may also be
derived from Psalm 137, with its call for mimetic revenge on Edom and
Babylon, though once again Waller'spoint is secular rather than religious:
To banishthosewho with such artcan sing,
Is a rudecrimewhich its own Cursedoes bring.91
Davenant was in exile because he was, like Waller and many others in Paris
at the time, a Royalist. Waller'suse of Psalm 137 to praise his friend seems
rather playful, but other Royalists turned to the psalm more seriously, and
without emptying it of its religious connotations. The most powerful use of
the psalm by the king's party is in the Earl of Clarendon's Contemplations
and reflectionsupon the Psalmsof David, written, at least by the author's ac-
count, in 1647, while he was in exile on the Isle of Jersey,just as Charles I
was at that time in a state combining exile and captivity on the Isle of
Wight.92Clarendon indicates in his title that he will apply the psalms "to the
Troubles of the Times," and in none of his contemplations is this applica-
tion more poignant than the one on Psalm 137. He focuses on love of
country as the basis for the pain of exile: "They who have not a very strong
Affection of Heart for their Country, cannot love any other Thing, hardly
God himself."93The aim of the piece is to emphasize the parallel conditions
90Waller, 166.
91Ibid.,167.
92Thework was publishedlong afterthis, so whetherClarendon'saccountof the cir-
cumstancesof the compositionof the Contemplations can be trustedis an open question.The
dating of the work to December26, ratherappropriatelythe feastof St. Stephen,the first
martyr,may be causefor furthersuspicion.It is also noteworthythat, thoughthe title of the
work reads"Jersey.Dec. 26. 1647,"the prefaceto his childrendescribesthe work as having
begun in Spain,"in the time of a formerBanishment."Whateverthe details,the important
point, clearly,is that Clarendonwishedthe Contemplationsto be associatedwith the Royalist
exile, and that Psalm137 was usefulto him in makingthis association.
93Clarendon, 745.
of the Israelites after the Babylonian conquest and of Englishmen loyal to

King Charles I after his defeat by the Parliamentarians.To this end he quotes
from Isaiah, who seems in this context a prophet of the English Civil War,
"YourCountryis desolate,your Citiesare burnt with Fire, and it is desolatedas
overthrownby Strangers."94 Clarendon's reading of Psalm 137 is entirely in
terms of his own condition:
To haveescapedthe presentSlaughter,and fled fromthe Calamity,mighthave
been looked upon as Safety,at least as a Reprieve,which alwaysadministers
some Hope; but when therewas to be no more returning,and that they who
got awaywerenevermoreto see theirNativeCountry,theywerelookedupon
in a betterCondition,who lost theirLivesat home, and it was thoughta Pre-
fermentto be buriedin their own Country.To ask of those who are carried
awaycaptiveout of it, to be merry,is the Insolenceof a proudConqueror;and
he who cancomplywith it, areworthyto be Slaves,havinga Mind preparedfor
it, by the Expirationof all his Affectionsfor his Country,which ought to be
dearerto him than his Life,or any thing his Lifecan be suppliedwith.95
The readermight well ask whether Clarendon is writing here about the Jews
or the Royalists, and where in the psalm, moreover, or anywhere else in the
Bible, there is mention of the exiles as those "who escaped the present
Slaughter, and fled," rather than those who were forcibly led away captive.
Clarendon's appropriation of the psalm is bold but not unique, and is
actually entirely in keeping with Charles I's own attempt, using allusions to
the psalms, to recasthimself as the suffering and penitent King David in the
Eikon Basilike, attacked so vehemently by Milton. Some years after the Res-
toration, Edward Pelling, the chaplain to the Duke of Somerset, gave a
sermon on the anniversaryof Charles I's "martyrdom"(January30), taking
as his text Ps. 137:1, in which he goes even further than Clarendon in read-
ing the psalm as a comment on contemporary events:
The Story,is of Them:the Applicationof it, is for Us; and at the veryfirstview
we mayeasilyaccommodatethis sadTextto this sadderDay. For,do but Date
the Captivity, StyloNovo: instead of By the RiversofBabylon, read, In a Land of
Confusion,(a Babel in our own Countrey:) Shift you [sic] Pious Thoughts from
the Monarchof Jerusalem,to the Memoryof our Own Soveraign,a Greater,a
Better than Zedekiah,(the Mirrourof Princes,the Noblest of Martyrs,the
Wonderof Ages,andthe Honourof Men:)...Remember thosemanifoldMiser-
ies thatwere throughout,
some, the Praeface;
others,the Epilogueto the dismal
Tragoedyof this Day; and then tell me, Wherin Our Captivitydiffer'dfrom
that in the text, unless it did in This, that 'twas more Infamous and Reproach-
94Ibid.
(italicsoriginal).
95Ibid.,746.
ful, becauseat Home; and 'twasnot (God be Blessed)for Seventyyears;'twas

not so Lastingas Our Sins;the Deliveranceout of it was too Quick and Hasty
for the Repentenceof thoseMiscreantswho madeus Captives.96
This application of the exile in Psalm 137 to the exile of Englishmen "at
Home" requiresa considerable interpretiveleap, and it shows once again the
flexibility of the idea of"exile" that has been demonstrated by its interpreters
since the first-century rabbis read, in the Babylonian conquest of Jerusalem,
its conquest in their own time by the Romans, and since Augustine ex-
plained the psalm as a lament for the "exile" of all human souls from
heaven.97
KILLING CHILDREN
shalhe be thattaketh& dasheththychildrenagainstthestones."98

"Blessed
Many readersof Psalm 137 are uncomfortable with the fact that it is a curse
as well as a lament, an expression of what C.S. Lewis calls "the spirit of ha-
tred which strikes us in the face ... like the heat from a furnace mouth."99
The final call for God to bless those who throw the Babylonian children
against the stones has been an embarrassmentto some Christians, but others
have relished the promise of vengeance it seems to offer. Translatorshave re-
sponded to this verse with considerable ingenuity.100Some writers retain the
curse, but avoid the children, as does Edwin Sandys, who substitutes the
more inclusive metonymy "thy cursed seed," which then leaves him free to
increase the bloodthirstiness of the final line: "With dasht-out brains the
96Pelling,2-3.
97On therabbinical to Kugel,1994,above,n. 26.
seethereference
interpretation
98Ps.137:9,GenevaBible(1560).
99Lewis,20.
'??Christopher Smart's1765 translation, outsideof the chronological scopeof this
study,is perhapstheboldestresponse, rewritingthefinalverseto praiseas"greatest andthe
best"theman"whospareshisenemiesprofest,/ AndChristian mildness owns"(Smart, 247).
A similarstrategyof radicalreinterpretation(oratleastwishfulthinking)seemsto lie behind
BishopArthurLake's sermoncallingforChristians to setasidetheirdifferences andfollow
the"compassionate disposition. . . whichappeared in the captive Jewes, when theysaid,IfI
forgetthee0 Jerusalem, letmyrighthandforget hercunning, if I doenotremember thee,letmy
tonguecleaveto theroofeof mymouth,if lpreferenotJerusalem before mychiefestjoy" (from
Lake's sermonon Ps.51:15,in Sermons withsomereligious anddivinemeditations [London,
1629],citedin McColley1997,88).Lakecouldnot,ofcourse,haveknowntheusesto which
Psalm137wouldbeputin theCivilWar,buthe couldhardlyhavebeenunaware of thedis-
tinctlackof any"compassionate disposition"in the finalcurse of the psalm itself.I am
indebtedto DianeKelseyMcColley forthisreference.
crying stones to feed."'l? Bacon inserts the children into verse 7 ("Remem-
ber thou, O Lord, the cruel cry/ Of Edom'schildren"), which lays the blame
on their heads and turns them from literal children into all the "offspring"of
Edom and Babylon, adults and children alike.102Other translators simply
wallow in the gore. Fletcher,Davison, and Carew vie for the grisliestversion,
but Oldham, elsewhere a master of satiric invective, surpassesthem all:
Blest,yea thrice-blessedbe that barbarousHand
(Oh Grief!that I such direRevengecommend)
Who tearsout Infantsfromtheirmother'sWomb,
And hurls'em yet unbornunto theirTomb.
Blesthe, who plucks'em fromtheirParents'Arms,
That Sanctuaryfromall commonHarms;
Who with theirSkullsand Bonesshallpavethy Streetsall o'er
And fill thy gluttedChannelswith theirscatter'dBrains& Gore.'03
Oldham's parenthetical grief at having to utter such a curse hardly mitigates
his obvious relish in the charnelhouse details of his paraphrase. Donald
Davie, who calls Oldham's paraphrase"the most horrible of psalm-versions
into English," also criticizesWither for indulging in an unchristian relish for
the psalm'sfinal verse (which in his first version blesses him that "brainesthy
babes in stony places").'04This is not quite fair, however, since in the prose
prayerprinted between his two translations of the psalm, Wither allegorizes
the Edomites/Babylonians into "spiritualdestroyers,"which implies that the
vengeance called for might be similarly "spiritual," and what the blessed
man "brains"turn out to be not Babylonian infants at all, but "sin, & here-
sies in their first birth." There is a long tradition of such allegorical escapes
from this verse. Augustine, for instance, in answer to his own rhetorical
question, "What are the little ones of Babylon?"answers"Evildesires at their
birth."105Calvin allows himself and his readersno such easy escape, insisting
on a literal reading:
And althoughit seeme a cruellthing, when hee wysheththeyrtenderBabes,
whiche as yet coulde doo no harme,too bee dashedand braynedagaynstthe
stones:yet notwithstandingforasmucheas he speakethnot of his own head,
but fetchethhis wordsat Gods mouth, it is nothingelse but a proclaymingof
Godsjustejudgement:like as alsowhen the Lordeavoucheth,thatlooke what
measureeche man hath used towardothers,the sameshalbemeasuredagaine
unto himselfe. Math, 7.2.106
'0?E.Sandys,125.
'02Bacon,285.
1031ldham, 143.
'04Davie, 167, 112.
'05Augustine, 1857, 176.
'0"Calvin,fol. 227.
The punishment of those "whiche as yet coulde doo no harme" may have
held particular interest for Calvin, so much concerned with election and
predestination. It may also be that Calvin'sharsh reading of Ps. 137: 9, like
his theology of life on earth as perpetual warfare, derived in part from his
own experience of political and religious strife in mid-sixteenth-century
France.107The French Civil Wars, as the English, may have inured their par-
ticipants and victims to a level of violence otherwise unacceptable to
Christian readersof the psalms.
This verse calling for vengeance was also invoked during the English
Civil War, by Stephen Marshall in his "fast sermon" to Parliament, Meroz
Cursed.It takes as its text Judges 5:23, "Curse ye Meroz (said the Angell of
the Lord) curse ye bitterly the inhabitants thereof, because they came not to
the helpe of the Lord, to the helpe of the Lord against the mighty" (Geneva
Bible). Not surprisingly in a sermon about cursing, Marshall comes to dis-
cuss Ps. 137:9. He admits that it seems harsh but affirms its justice in the
context (and, by implication, in his own context, England in the 1640s):
What Souldiersheartwould not startat this, not only when he is in hot bloodto
cut downearmedenemiesin thefield, but afterwarddeliberately to come into a
subduedCity,and takethe littleonesupon the spearespoint, to takethem by the
heelesand beat out their brainesagainstthe walles,what inhumanitieand bar-
barousnessewould this be thought?Yetif thisworkbe to revengeGods Church
againstBabylon,he is a blessedmanthattakesanddashesthelittleonesagainstthe
stones.108
In this sermon, whose subject is essentially "if you're not for us, you're
against us," there is no allegorization. The vengeance called for is most lit-
eral, and this is, after all, in keeping with the spirit of the psalm. It is an
interesting case of the broad influence of the Psalms that both sides in the
Civil War turned to the same psalm for solace or support. Any condition of
alienation or estrangement could be interpreted as exile, and "Babylon,"as
noted above, could be applied to any convenient enemy and oppressor. In
his Scripture Vindicated, attacking Marshall'sMeroz Cursed,Edward Sym-
mons wrote with some exasperation, "Under the notion of Babylon [are
comprehended] the King and his children, the nobility and the gentry, the
ministers of the Gospel of Jesus Christ, and Christians of all sorts."109
The explanation for the popularity of Psalm 137 in the Renaissancemay
lie in its ease of application to severalwidespread contemporary conditions.
'70n Calvin'snotionof"perpetual warfare,"seeBouwsma, 182-88.

11-12.
'O?Marshall,
in Hill,112.I amindebtedto Hill'sdiscussion
'09Cited of therangeof interpretation
of
biblical"Babylon"byEnglishmen of allsorts.
As the examples cited above suggest, Renaissance translatorsand paraphras-

ers of Psalm 137, whether poets, scholars, or both, found in this psalm a
source of consolation for a variety of situations of exile, alienation, loss, and
estrangement, according to the religious and political views or the personal
circumstances of the interpreters. Furthermore, the psalm particularly ap-
pealed to writers, since it representedthe condition of exile in terms of loss
of voice and skill, the inability to sing. The psalm'semphasis on the fragility
of memory and the dangers of forgetting one's cultural and religious roots
also touched a nerve connecting to a central anxiety of both Renaissance
Humanists and Protestant Reformers. Finally, the last verses of the psalm,
sanctioning and offering a model for vengeful cursing, proved especially at-
tractive during these centuries of violent religious conflict. Donne told his
congregation at St. Paul'sin 1626 that "The Psalmes are the Manna of the
Church. As Manna tasted to every man like that that he liked best, so doe
the Psalmes minister instruction, and satisfaction, to every man, in every
emergency and occasion."110The evidence shows that Psalm 137 satisfied
the appetites of all who hungered for it.
THE OHIO STATE UNIVERSITY, MANSFIELD
"lDonne, 91.
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Psalm Culture in the English Renaissance: Readings of Psalm 137 by Shakespeare, Spenser,

Milton, and Others

Psalm137, "Bythe Watersof Babylonwe sat downand wept,"one of the mostwidelyknown

1. By the rivers of Babylon, there we sat down, yea, we wept, when we

*Forhelpfuladviceat variousstagesin the researchand writingof this article,I would

Renaissance Quarterly 55 (2002): 224-257 [224]

he Reformationopenedthe doorto bothvernaculartranslationand in-

applied by its early readers.5To some extent, this "interpretedBible" remains

STREAMS AND TEARS

"Bythe watersofBabylonwesat downeand weapte."6

raine."9The thankfulness of the plain here is a curious addition, especially

parallels "great Euphrates flood" in his first stanza).12John Norris' para-

The tears of this lament suggested to several Renaissance poets another

FIGURE1: EmblemXV, book 4, FrancisQuarles,Emblemes, London, 1635.

20Augustine, readsthepsalmin termsof hisconceptof "two

Babyloniantreesalso lie behind the suspended,and impotent,weaponsof

Perhapsthe most memorableimagein this psalmis the hangingof the harps

32Faerie Queene,2.12.80, cited in Parker,55-66. On the translationof the instruments,

.ii. lai .i $te. x .

FIGURE2: Frontpiece to JeremyTaylor,ThePsalterof David, Oxford, 1644. Bei-

4'The descriptionof the sceneas "emblem"may derivefromElysor it may simplyhave

Carew's,and Henry King's.46The point of the unstringing may lie in an im-

sense of "sympatheticvibration" until the nineteenth century, but that cer-

One version of Psalm 137 which offers a particularlyelaborate develop-

REMEMBERING AND FORGETTING

forms, based always on an ignorance of the actual structure of Hebrew po-

By imitatinghymnody... an ode revealsits conceptionof a hymn as a being-

65Milton'sOde"OntheMorningof Christ's forinstance,

70TheTeDeumsets itselfup in much the sameway,a patristichymn posingas a psalm,

STRANGERS IN STRANGE LANDS

The psalmist'sproblemhereseems not one of singing temple songs before

He not only adds the towersto the psalm'sBabyloniancityscape,but em-

7Campion, 74. Of course,whatthe Babylonianscannot"understand" probablyalsoin-

Richard II begins with the double banishment of Mowbray and Boling-

86See Lam. 1:1-4, GenevaBible(1560).

he does die, in ironic fulfillment of prophecy, in the "JerusalemChamber"

of the Israelites after the Babylonian conquest and of Englishmen loyal to

ful, becauseat Home; and 'twasnot (God be Blessed)for Seventyyears;'twas

shalhe be thattaketh& dasheththychildrenagainstthestones."98

'70n Calvin'snotionof"perpetual warfare,"seeBouwsma, 182-88.

As the examples cited above suggest, Renaissance translatorsand paraphras-

Fry,PaulH. 1980. ThePoet'sCallingin the -- . 1994. "Psalm 137." In In

Oldham,SirJohn. 1987. ThePoemsofJohn Shaheen,Naseeb. 1989. BiblicalReferences

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