Psalm culture in the English renaissance: Readings of Psalm 137 by Shakespeare, Spenser, Milton, and Others (*).

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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's song 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. (1)

The Reformation opened the door to both vernacular translation and individual interpretation of the Bible, and one of the immediate and lasting results was a widespread "psalm culture," in which poets, theologians, 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?" (12) 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 poetical1 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 order 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 unavoidably partial, since the influence of the psalm was confined by neither national nor period boundaries (4) -- provides a case study of the ways in which the Bible was made meaningful to its sixteenth- and seventeenth-century 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 argued that to understand a biblical culture (and this holds true of post-Reformation England as of ancient Israel) scholars must read not just the Bible, 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 applied by its early readers. (5) To some extent, this "interpreted Bible" remains as inaccessible as its long-dead interpreters, but some of these interpreters were also writers of translations, paraphrases, commentaries, sermons, or allusive poems and plays. In these documents their interpretations survive. 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 "interpreted Psalm 137."

STREAMS AND TEARS

"By the waters of Babylon we sat downe and 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 riverside setting of the psalm was felt to be appropriate to its subject, and Renaissance translators often 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 example, begins with the Jews sitting "sad and desolate" beside the river, At the end of his second stanza the "stream of tears" that bursts forth from the eyes of the exiles seems to match and respond to the stream on whose banks they sir. (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. (8) The 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 "watreth Babells thanckfull plaine" and the "teares in pearled rowes" augment the "water with their raine." (9) The 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 representation of it, is Sir John Oldham's gready 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." (10) 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 your fountains gently vies
With rivers, teares with waves, as if these drops
Meant to outrunne thine, Babylon! (11)

Saltmarsh's interpretation, like Oldham's, seems to suit the feelings of the exiles 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, super flumina), 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'd with weepings," as also Richard Crashaw, when he wrote that "Harpes and hearts were drown'd in Teares" (which matches and parallels "great Euphrates flood" in his first stanza). (12) John Norris' paraphrase 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:

Beneath a reverend gloomy shade
Where Tigris and Euphrates cut their way,
With folded arms and head supinely laid
We sate, and wept out all the tedious day,
Within its Banks grief could 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 river not 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 alternative source of music, and a music more appropriate to the Exile than the "light mirth" of actual songs:

These rivets yield us the fitt'st musick: we
Account their murmures our best harmony:
In them the Embleme of our fate appears:
Their murmures show our groans, their streams our tears. (14)

Once again the streams of the river are linked to those of the mourners weeping eyes, the former representing the latter as an "Embleme." The "harmony" referred to is only in part the actual audible "music" of the murmuring stream. More importantly, it is the inaudible harmony of a sympathetic "agreement of feeling or sentiment" (OED 2) or even of a more profound correspondence between different elements in nature, the "harmony" between the river and the Israelites partaking in small measure of the musica mundana, that "harmony" of mathematical proportion, described by Boethius, which knits all creation together. (15)

The tears of this lament suggested to several Renaissance poets another biblical scene of weeping, that of the personified Jerusalem in Lamentations, the widow who "weepeth sore in the night" (Lam. 1:2, KJV). The connection between the two passages is 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 powerfully 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: "Jerusalem remembered 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 readers who 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 D avison, in whose version the Jews hang up their harps:

When, poore Syons dolefull state,
  Desolate;
Sacked, burned and inthrall'd,
And the Temple spoil'd, which wee
  Ne'r should see,
To our mirthlesse mindes wee call'd. (17)

The Widow of Lamentations may also lie behind the figure of Mother Jerusalem 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"). (18) She is realized visually in Francis Quarles' 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." (19) This notion seems to be derived from Augustine's allegorical reading of the psalm, which applies the "stranger in a strange land" topos to the heavenward-yearning of a soul in earthly exile. (20) Quarles then reconfigures the symbolism in terms of the classical myth of Orpheus and Eurydice:

Ah! If my voice could, Orpheus-like, unspel
My poor Euridice, my soul, from hell
Of earth's misconstrued Heav'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 Lamentations 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 Lamentations, 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 fundamental to the Renaissance. (24) Here, 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's poem, is not aversion of Jerusalem or Jerusalem-inexile 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. (25) This is especially appropriate for Spenser, since for late sixteenth-century Protestants "Babylon," in Psalm 137 and Lamentations, as in Revelation, had come to stand for Catholic Rome, and, despite the initial allusive parallel to Jerusalem, it is Rome for which Verlame stands, 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, "A Woman sitting sorrowfullie wailing," her eyes weeping "streames of teares" as she proceeds to tell her story. (28) Here the figures of Psalm 137 and Lamentations 1-2 are combined and inverted. The poem contains other ironies, such as the disappearance of the Thames from the vicinity of the town, which Verlame attributes to "great griefe." (29) In the tradition of translating and paraphrasing Psalm 137, however, the sympathetic grief of the river is 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 emblems in A Theatre for Worldlings shows "Hard by a rivers side, a wailing Nimphe," a personification of Rome much like Verlame. (30) Even Colin C1out's hanging up of his pipe at the end of The Shepheardes Calendar may be a transposition from biblical to pastoral elegy of the gesture of the Jewish harpers from Psalm 137. (31) Patricia Parker has pointed out, furthermore, that the Israelites' harps (sometimes translated as "instruments") hanging on Babylonian trees also lie behind the suspended, and impotent, weapons of the knight Verdant -- "His warlike armes, the idle instruments/ Of sleeping praise, were hong upon a tree" -- the victim of the Enchantress Acrasia in book 2 of The Faerie Queene. (32) This Psalm was obviously one with a singular resonance for Spenser.

HARP MUSIC

"We hanged our harpes upon the willowes in the middes thereof." (33)

Perhaps the most memorable image in this psalm is the hanging of the harps on the trees near the river. However, despite the vividness of this figure in the collective memory of English poetry, there is some disagreement about what precisely these instruments were. The most common English rendering of the Hebrew kinnor (an instrument something like a lyre) (34) is "harps," but confusion persists due to the Vulgate's use of organa, a generic term for "instruments" that has even been rendered occasionally as the English "organ" -- a rather cumbersome thing to hang on a tree, even in the medieval portative form. Jerome himself decided against organa in his retranslation of the Psalter from the Hebrew, shifting to citharas, and this was also the translation used in the Protestant Latin Bible of Junius and Tremellius. (35) Some of the English translators hedged their bets, like William Whittingham, who, for the "Sternhold and Hopkins" psalter, translated the word as the pair, "harps & instruments." (36) This pairi ng was also used by William Barton in his mid-seventeenth century psalter, while Matthew Parker's has the equally ambivalent, but more awkward, "Harpes and Organs." The engraver of the frontispiece to Jeremy Taylor's 1644 Psalter of David (Fig. 2) offered an even wider range of instruments. On either side of the penitential King David are 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 selection of instruments. Other poets, notably the emblematists, envisioned the harps as various members of the string family. In a typically Renaissance syncretism, they often melded the biblical characters and narratives with apparently analogous ones in classical mythology. Two frequently-linked figures 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 accompaniment 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. (38) Francis 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 metamorphosis from harp to lute, the poem begins:

Urge me no more: this airy mirth belongs
To better times: these times are not for songs.
The sprightly twang of the melodious lute
Agrees not 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, inappropriate 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 allows Quarles to include in his dismissal the musical recreations familiar to his Caroline readers.

In Edmund Arwaker's Pia 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. (40) Then follows an excursus on the power of music to lift the spirits, using the examples of sailors, 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 describes a more general condition of grief--a kind of emotional exile -- at being "Fortune's wounded Captive." Once an accomplished musician who "Cou'd with Israel's sweetest Singer vie," his ability is now lost. The poet here notes that if he were to sing, in his reduced state, "'twou'd be/ Some doleful Emblem of my misery." (41) When, in exile, he thinks on his "lov'd Country," the result is that his "Lute," his "Voice," and his "Mind" all "lose their harmony." (42) Arwaker uses " harmony," as Elys did, in the sense of musical concord and also in the mote abstract sense 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 condition. Nothing is said of the instruments in the Hebrew psalm (or the Vulgate or English Bibles) beyond their location in the trees, but the metrical 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 which we lately sang,
Mute as ourselves, on Willows hang.

Oldham is similarly direct, with harps "as mute and dumb as we," and Norris' 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', Carew's, and Henry King's. (46) The point of the unstringing may lie in an implicit and commonplace Latin pun on cor/chorda, linking strings and hearts, the source of the English idiom "heartstrings." This buried pun is made explicit in Phineas Fletcher's paraphrase, when the Israelites respond to the Babylonian request to "Take down your harps, and string them":

Were our harps well tun'd in every string,
  Our heart-strings broken,
  Throats drown'd and soken
With tears and sighs, how can we praise and sing
The King of heav'n under an heathen king? (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'd and soken" throats which play on the "streams-tears" motif). Oldham's paraphrase makes the point cleat:

Our Harps, as mute and dumb as we,
Hung useless and neglected by,
And now and then a broken String would lend a Sigh,
As if with us they felt a Sympathy,
And mourn'd their own 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. (49) In 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. (50) So the notion, if not the name, of the "Aeolian harp" is linked from antiquity with the instrument of the psalmist. The OED does not record a use of the word "sympathy" in the sense of "sympathetic vibration" until the nineteenth century, but that certainly seems to be one of the senses of the word in this passage from Oldham, used as a figure for the emotional sympath y of the familiar pathetic 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, Saltmarsh's first meditation:

No stops
In this sad Musick? how these mourners seem,
As though they wept division with thy stream! (52)

These are relatively commonplace puns but interesting nevertheless. (53) The 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 reference to 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 "disagreement" or "conflict" (in keeping with the "vying" between the "tears and waves" several lines further on). Interestingly, Saltmarsh's two puns work in opposite directions, In the first case, given the context -- why are you weeping so much? -- "stops" means primarily "cessation," and the musical senses are secondary. In the second, though it is used metaphorically, "division" means primari ly "musical variation," the weeping of the mourners "played" to the accompaniment of the stream. This time the more familiar non-musical sense is secondary, perhaps occurring even only in retrospect after Salrmarsh later introduces the note of competition between the weepers and the river.

One version of Psalm 137 which offers a particularly elaborate development of the musical motif is the lute-song "As by the streames of Babilon" by England's only notable poet-composer, Thomas Campion. His translation of Psalm 137 appears in the first of his Two Bookes of Ayres (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 occurs in the lines describing the harps:

Aloft the trees that spring up there
Our silent Harps wee pensive hung.... (54)

The wordplay here depends upon the etymology for "pensive" in the Latin root, pendeolpendere or "to hang" (Lewis and Short, A Latin Dictionary, s.y. pendeo I.B.1). (55) The Latin word can also mean "to be suspended, interrupted, 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 etymology of "pensive" is actually from the French penser, 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 captive Jews in a complex figure of sympathy or "harmony." The complexity lies partly in a rather Miltonic syntactic ambiguity (deriving from Latin syntax), which allows "pensive" to modify either, or both, o f 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)

REMEMBERING AND FORGETTING

"If I forget thee, O Jerusalem: let my right hand forget her cunning. If I doe not remember thee, let my tongue cleave to the roofe of my mouth; if I prefer not Ierusalem above my chiefe joy." (57)

Memory is at the heart of Psalm 137. The Jews struggle to keep alive their memory of Jerusalem in exile in Babylon, and to this end the psalmist vows that if he forgets Jerusalem his right hand should "forget her cunning." Furthermore, 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 "right hand" -- the psalmist's ability 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 pleasure them" calls for only a temporary lapse of skill to frustrate the Babylonians' desire for entertainment. More characteris tic is the general and total forgetting called for in Edwin Sandys' paraphrase:

Let parched tong to withering palat growe
And skilful hand no more his science knowe. (58)

The Latinate "science" here is also interesting, since it includes both specific technical mastery and knowledge in the broader sense (OED 2b or perhaps 3d and 1). Crashaw's paraphrase of this verse knits together music and memory so as to suggest that Jerusalem is the basis of the psalmist's music:

Ah thee Jerusalem! ah sooner may
This hand forget the mastery
Of Musicks dainty touch, then I
The Musicke of thy memory. (59)

The central concern of Psalm 137 with memory, and the essential connection 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. (60) The analogy between Hebrew and Greek literary forms, based always on an ignorance of the actual structure of Hebrew poetry; goes back at least to Jerome's question, "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?" (61) Jerome's authority may lie behind Isaac Watts remark 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." (62) But the connection between psalms and odes may be more basic. Both words derive from Greek musical terms, "psalm" from psalmos, a song sung to a pl ucked instrument, 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 "presence of voice" -- as it inhered in the Greek hymns and the Hebrew psalms -- which Paul Fry describes:

By imitating hymnody ... an ode reveals its conception of a hymn as a being-present to a transcendent, originary voice. The aim of the ode is to recover and usurp the voice to which hymns defer: not merely to participate in the presence but to be the voice. (63)

He writes further that

Like the hymn, the ode or "hymn extempore" longs for participation in the divine, but it never participates communally, never willingly supplies a congregation with common prayer because it is bent on recovering a priestly role that is not pastoral but 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 nineteenth-century poet longs to bridge, may be a common feature of these. For Renaissance poets translating Psalm 137, however, there was no such distance, 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 expresses the very problem which Fry argues is basic to the ode: how can I sing the Lord's song in exile (cut off from the "presence of 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 recapture the "presence of voice." This presence derives from the psalm's status as Scripture, all of which is conceived of as, to so me degree, divinely inspired. 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 prayer in the psalmist's memory of temple 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 recurrence in Milton's poetry. (65) One such recurrence involves a brief but crucial allusion to Psalm 137. In book 3 of Paradise Lost the heavenly choir of angels sings a hymn of praise to the Father and the Son after the latter has offered to redeem the sin of Adam by sacrificing himself, "death for death." (66) As Diane McColley points out, the song is a broad paraphrase of or extended allusion to the Te Deum Laudamus. (67) The Te Deum itself incorporates several allusions to the psalms in its final section, however, and it seems not to have been remarked that Milton's "Te Deum" follows suit. (68) Milton's hymn closes with an allusion to Ps. 137:5-6:

... thy Name
Shall be the copious matter of my Song
Henceforth, and never shall my Harp thy praise
Forget, nor from thy Father's praise disjoin. (69)

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 Jerusalem 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 involves more, however, than simply a generic marking of Milton's inset poem. In both the Te Deum and Milton's "hymn" there is a shift in voice between first person plural and singular. The Te Deum begins with common prayer ("We") and ends with an individual petition, "0 Lorde, in thee have I trusted: let me never be confounded." (71) Milton's shifting pronouns are more complicated, since they effectively blur the distinction between reported and direct speech. He begins with the former, signalled by "first they 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"). (72) The point seems to be that Milton actually joins in the heavenly choir at this point, or at least would like to. (73) This marks the crucial difference between Milton's conditi on 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 overcome 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.

STRANGERS IN STRANGE LANDS

"How shall we synge the Lordes songe in a straunge lande?" (74)

The psalmist's anxiety 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 people from their true home, which is another focus of interest for those translating, paraphrasing, or alluding to this psalm (especially given the cultural and spiritual alienation at the heart of both the Renaissance and Reformation, movements of renewal and rebirth founded on the rediscovery arid reappropriation of past cultures that remained to some extent irredeemably 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 of Sion, for instance, a collection of metrical paraphrases and meditations on psalms and other scripture, was "set for the ioy of gods deere ones, who sitr here by the brookes of this worlds Babel, & weepe when they thinke on Hierusalem which is on highe." (76) Other writers felt a more earthly homesickness, however, for the obvious reason t hat 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 English nation residing at Hamborough (Hamburg]." (77) Even if not everyone experienced physical exile, the fear of being forced to live in a foreign country, 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 particular anxiety; as is implied in Henry King's translation of Ps. 137:4:

But how shall we sing the Lords Song,
His Enemies among?
Or tune His Notes in strangers Land,
That cannot understand?

The psalmist's problem here seems not one of singing temple songs before heathen Babylonians as it is, for instance, in Campion's ayre ("Is then the song of our God fit/ To be prophan'd in a forraine land?"), but rather of singing to an audience that doesn't know the language. (78) King's focus on language may derive from a traditional conflation of Babylon and Babel, based primarily on the fact that the latter is the Hebrew name for the former. (79) However, since the story of Babel in Genesis 11 concerns the fall from an original linguistic unity to a confusion of tongues, many interpreters of later biblical references to Babylon read into them the concern with language and confusion of the etiological Babel account. Once again, this tradition may originate with the typological reading habits of Augustine, who recounts the story of the Fall of the tower as the early history of Babylon: "That is why the name 'Confusion' was given to the city; because it was here that the Lord confused the languages of all th e earth." (80) The use of "Babel" rather than "Babylon" in several translations of Psalm 137 (the Countess of Pembroke's quoted above, Edwin Sandys', and Wither's, for example) may echo the early "history" of the city in Genesis 11, though the disyllabic name may sometimes also just be a metrical convenience. Fletcher is more explicit in his paraphrase:

So shall thy towers
And all thy princely bowers,
Proud Babel, fall.... (81)

He not only adds the towers to the psalm's Babylonian cityscape, but emphasizes pride as the sin which will bring about their fall, just as it did in the traditional interpretation of the Babel story in Genesis. (82) Similar echoes of the fall of Babel occur in Davison ("And, thou Babel, when the tide! Of thy pride") and Carew ("Sitting by the streames that Glide! Downe Babells Towring wall") (83)

The Babel story's focus on language may also have been what suggested to Shakespeare the appropriateness of Psalm 137 as an expression of the Englishman's anxiety about living among those who don't know English. He incorporates an allusion to the psalm at a key point in Richard II. In act 1, scene 3, after Richard has banished him for life, Mowbray laments his sentence in what amounts to an inset paraphrase of Psalm 137:

The language I have learnt these forty years,
My native English, now I must forgo,
And now my tongue's use is to me no more
Than an unstringed viol or a harp,
Or like a cunning instrument cas'd up --
Or being open, put into his hands
That knows no touch to tune the harmony.
Within my mouth you have engaol'd my tongue,
Doubly portcullis'd with my teeth and lips,
And dull unfeeling barren ignorance
Is made my gaoler to attend on me.
I am too old to fawn upon a nurse,
Too far in years to be a pupil now:
What is thy sentence then but speechless death,
Which robs my tongue from breathing native breath? (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's lament is his own psalm of exile.

Psalm 137 seems to have been on Shakespeare's mind as he wrote Richard 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:

For ever may my knees grow to the earth,
My tongue cleave to my roof within my mouth,
Unless a pardon ere I rise or speak.
(5.3.29-31) (85)

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 larger concerns 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. Richard'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 "other Eden, demi-paradise," into "a tenement 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 represented in terms of the fall of Jerusalem in act 1 scene 2, when Gloucester's widow mourns her fallen manor (Plashy, with its appropriately watery name), expressing her own bereavement, and, by extension, that of the realm - - all due to Richard's sins:

Alack, and what shall good old York there see
But empty lodgings and unfurnish'd walls,
Unpeopled offices, untrodden stones,
And what hear there for welcome but my groans?
Therefore commend me; let him not come there
To seek our sorrow that dwells everywhere.
Desolate, desolate, will I hence and die:
The last leave of thee rakes my weeping eye.
(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's and Davison's translations of Psalm 137): "Desolate, desolate." (86) As noted above, the linking of the laments for Jerusalem in Psalm 137 and Lamentations 1 was traditional. The England of Richard IL like the biblical Jerusalem, is in ruins because of the sins of her people and, especially, 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's misrule at 2.1.291 as a "slavish yoke," suggesting, with the psalm in mind, a "Babylonian" captivity). It is also intriguing, 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 J erusalem. He is ultimately unable to make the journey and so passes the burden of atonement on to his son. Yet he does die, in ironic fulfillment of prophecy; in the "Jerusalem Chamber" 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's original 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 (sayd we) who can once frame,
his sorrowfull hart to syng:
The prayses of our loving God,
thus under a straunge kyng?

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 indebted to the "Sternhold and Hopkins" psalter, but Whittingham's emphasis on the "straunge king" would have appealed to the Puritan Barton for obvious reasons, even though the two translators had different kings in mind. Bacon's translation also includes a "foreign king," 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 tears and sighs, how can we praise and sing

The King of heav'n under an heathen king? (88)

Norris' refusal to sing "to those who're aliens to our Heavenly king" 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 Edmund Wailer's, in his poem "To Sir William Davenant upon his first two books of Gondibert, written in France." Waller, the translator of at least one psalm (104), converts the story of the exiled Israelites into 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:

The drooping Hebrews banish'd harps unstrung
At Babylon, upon the willows hung;
Yours sounds aloud, and tell's us you excell
No less in Courage, than in Singing well
Whilst unconcern'd you let your Country know,
They have impoverished themselves, 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 remarkable, since he can sing even in exile. Of course, the comparison cannot bear much scrutiny since, as Waller implies, Davenant was banished by his country not just from 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's point is secular rather than religious:

To banish those who with such art can sing,
Is a rude crime which its own Curse does bring. (91)

Davenant was in exile because he was, like Waller and many others in Paris at the time, a Royalist. Waller's use 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 reflections upon the Psalms of David, written, at least by the author's account, 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. (92) Clarendon indicates in his title that he will apply the psalms "to the Troubles of the Times," and in none of his contemplations is this application 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." (93) The aim of the piece is to emphasize the parallel conditions 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, "Your Country is desolate, your Cities are burnt with Fire, and it is desolated as overthrown by Strangers." (94) Clarendon's reading of Psalm 137 is entirely in terms of his own condition:

To have escaped the present Slaughter, and fled from the Calamity; might have been looked upon as Safety, at least as a Reprieve, which always administers some Hope; but when there was to be no more returning, and that they who got away were never more to see their Native Country, they were looked upon in a better Condition, who lost their Lives at home, and it was thought a Preferment to be buried in their own Country. To ask of those who are carried away captive out of it, to be merry, is the Insolence of a proud Conqueror; and he who can comply with it, are worthy to be Slaves, having a Mind prepared for it, by the Expiration of all his Affections for his Country, which ought to be dearer to him than his Life, or any thing his Life can be supplied with. (95)

The reader might 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 recast himself as the suffering and penitent King David in the Eikon Basilike, attacked so vehemently by Milton. Some years after the Restoration, Edward Pelling, the chaplain to the Duke of Somerset, gave a sermon on the anniversary of Charles I's "martyrdom" (January 30), taking as his text Ps. 137:1, in which he goes even further than Clarendon in reading the psalm as a comment on contemporary events:

The Story, is of Them: the Application of it, is for Us; and at the very first view we may easily accommodate this sad Text to this sadder Day. For, do but Date the Captivity, Stylo Novo: instead of By the Rivers of Babylon read, In a Land of Confusion, (a Babel in our own Countrey:) Shift you [sic] Pious Thoughts from the Monarch of Jerusalem, to the Memory of our Own Soveraign, a Greater, a Better than Zedekiah, (the Mirrour of Princes, the Noblest of Martyrs, the Wonder of Ages, and the Honour of Men:)...Remember those manifold Miseries that were throughout some, the Praeface; others, the Epilogue to the dismal Tragoedy of this Day; and then tell me, Wherin Our Captivity differ'd from that in the text, unless it did in This, that 'twas more Infamous and Reproachful, because at Home; and 'twas not (God be Blessed) for Seventy years; 'twas not so Lasting as Our Sins; the Deliverance out of it was too Quick and Hasty for the Repentence of those Miscreants who made us Captives. (96)

This application of the exile in Psalm 137 to the exile of Englishmen "at Home" requires a considerable interpretive leap, 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 explained the psalm as a lament for the "exile" of all human souls from heaven. (97)

KILLING CHILDREN

"Blessed shal he be that taketh & dasheth thy children against the stones." (98)

Many readers of 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 hatred 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 scones has been an embarrassment to some Christians, but others have relished the promise of vengeance it seems to offer. Translators have responded to this verse with considerable ingenuity. (100) Some 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 crying stones to feed." (101) Bacon inserts the children into verse 7 ("Remember thou, O Lord, the cruel cry/ Of Edom's children"), 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. (102) Other translators simply wallow in the gore. Fletcher, Davison, and Carew vie for the grisliest version, but Oldham, elsewhere a master of satiric invective, surpasses them all:

Blest, yea thrice-blessed be that barbarous Hand
(Oh Grief! that I such dire Revenge commend)
Who tears out Infants from their mother's Womb,
And hurls 'em yet unborn unto their Tomb.
Blest he, who plucks 'em from their Parents' Arms,
That Sanctuary from all common Harms;
Who with their Skulls and Bones shall pave thy Streets all o'er
And fill thy glutted Channels with their scatter'd Brains & Gore. (103)

(Oh Grief! that I such dire Revenge commend)

Who tears out Infants from their mother's Womb,

And hurls 'em yet unborn unto their Tomb.

Blest he, who plucks 'em from their Parents' Arms,

That Sanctuary from all common Harms;

Who with their Skulls and Bones shall pave thy Streets all o'er

And fill thy glutted Channels with their scatter'd Brains & Gore. (103)

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 criticizes Wither for indulging in an unchristian relish for the psalm's final verse (which in his first version blesses him that "braines thy babes in stony places"). (104) This is not quite fair, however, since in the prose prayer printed between his two translations of the psalm, Wither allegorizes the Edomites/Babylonians into "spiritual destroyers," 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, & heresies 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 "Evil desires at their birth." (105) Calvin allows himself and his readers no such easy escape, insisting on a literal reading:

And although it seeme a cruell thing, when hee wysheth theyr tender Babes, whiche as yet coulde doo no harme, too bee dashed and brayned agaynst the stones: yet notwithstanding forasmuche as he speaketh not of his own head, but fetcheth his words at Gods mouth, it is nothing else but a proclayming of Gods juste judgement: like as also when the Lorde avoucheth, that looke what measure eche man hath used toward others, the same shalbe measured againe unto himselfe. Math, 72. (106)

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's harsh 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. (107) The French Civil Wars, as the English, may have inured their participants and victims to a level of violence otherwise unacceptable to Christian readers of 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 discuss 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 Souldiers heart would not start at this, not only when he is in hot blood to cut downe armed enemies in the field, but afterward deliberately to come into a subdued City, and take the little ones upon the speares point, to take them by the heeles and beat out their braines against the walles, what inhumanitie and barbarousnesse would this be thought? Yet if this work be to revenge Gods Church against Babylon, he is a blessed man that takes and dashes the little ones against the 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 literal, 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's Meroz Cursed, Edward Symmons 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 Renaissance may lie in its ease of application to several widespread contemporary conditions.

As the examples cited above suggest, Renaissance translators and paraphrasers 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 appealed to writers, since it represented the condition of exile in terms of loss of voice and skill, the inability to sing. The psalm's emphasis 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 attractive during these centuries of violent religious conflict. Donne told his congregation at St. Paul's in 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." (110) The evidence shows that Psalm 137 satisfied the appetites of all who hungered for it.

(*.) For helpful advice at various stages in the research and writing of this article, I would like to thank John Hollander, Thomas M. Greene, Paula Loscocco, Lawrence Manley, Annabel Patterson, David Quint, John N. King, and my RQ readers, Diane Kelsey MeColley, P.G. Stanwood, and Paul F. Grendler.

(1.) As an initial reminder of the text of Psalm 137, I reproduce here the King James Version (spelling and punctuation modernized), since it is probably the Renaissance translation most widely known among modern readers. This is not to imply, of course, that it was so in the Renaissance. For readers in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century England, the best known version would have been that of the Book of Common Prayer, which was essentially the translation of the 1539 Great Bible by Miles Coverdale (and which was actually the source of much of the language of the later KJV text).

(2.) Hooker, 150.

(3.) Ibid. Clearly it is the literary quality of the Psalms, their power as poetry, that Hooker sees as decisive.

(4.) The focus of this study is Psalm 137 in England, but similar studies could be done for other countries. See, for instance, Di Mauro and Creel. For evidence of the popularity of Psalm 137 among French poets, seethe 1606 Paris publication of French paraphrases of Psalm 137 by Clement Marot, Philippe Desportes, Jacques Davy Du Perron, Guillaume Du Vair, Antoine Nerveze, and others (cited in Cave, 97, n. 1). The psalm also continued to draw poets. among others, long after the seventeenth century. For a few examples among many: Christopher Smart wrote a bold paraphrase of the psalm, Lord Byron paraphrased it twice, Heinrich Heine's "Jehuda ben Halevy" is a powerful poetic response to its expression of exiled longing for revenge, the Finnish composer Jean Sibelius set to music a paraphrase by the poet Hjalmar Procope, and John Hollander's poem "Kinnerer" is an extended meditation on the psalm.

(5.) Kugel, 1997, xv.

(6.) Ps. 137:1, in Coverdale's translation from the Great Bible (1539). Unless otherwise noted, all citations of psalms from the major Bible translations are from Wright.

(7.) Bacon, 284-85. Published in 1625, Bacon's psalms were dedicated to George Herbert.

(8.) Davison, 424. Davison's psalms were not published (the principal source is Harleian Manuscript no. 6930 in the British Library), but his Psalm 137 is included in Grierson's ed. of Donne, to whom it was for many years attributed. Carew, 149. Like Davison's, Carew's psalms were not published during his lifetime. His Psalm 137 was set to music by Henry Lawes and printed in the 1655 Select Psalms of a New Translation. See Spink, 2000, 126-29, and also the 1984 recording by Anthony Rooley and The Consort of Musicke (Hyperion CDA66135. In his program note to the Hyperion recording, Clifford Bartlett argues that the 1655 Select Psalmes (which also included psalm translations by George Sandys) was a Royalist pamphlet, marked by the prominent place of the Psalm of Exile at the beginning of the selection.

(9.) Pembroke, 231.

(10.) Oldham, 140. Oldham dates this paraphrase "December 22. 1676. at Bedington."

(11.) Saltmarsh, 1. Saltmarsh (c.1610-47) was a parliamentary chaplain and the author of mystical religious works as well as the Poemata Sacra (1636). The italics here and in all further citations are original.

(12.) Crashaw, 104-05. Page references will 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 Preparation to the Psalter (1619). He was eager to supplant the "Sternhold and Hopkins" psalter with his improved version, but the failure of this plan is marked by the obscure publication of The Psalms of David in the Netherlands in 1632.

(13.) Norris, 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.

(14.) Elys, fol. C4. Elys (born c. 1634) was an Oxford MA and a dergyman, friendly with the Quakers.

(15.) For an extended treatment of this "music," see Hollander, 1961, 20-51, and Palisca, 161-90.

(16.) "...all her gates are desolate" in the KJV.

(17.) Bacon, 284; Davison, 424. Davison's use is of course the more striking of the two, the sharp line break very effectively figuring the desolation of Zion in the isolation of the word itself.

(18.) Crashaw, 105. George Sandys (1578-1644) was a famous traveler to the East and the translator of Ovid's Metamorp hoses (often described as one of the first literary works produced in America, where Sandys was for some years Treasurer of the Virginia Company) as well as the translator of the 1636 Paraphrase upon the Psalmes of David, widely admired by contemporaries for its literary merit.

(19.) Quarles, 242. Though he also wrote other verse, Quarles (1592-1644) was the most popular and influential of the English emblemarisrs. His Emblemes (1635) and Hieroglyphikes of the Life of Man (1638) continued to be reprinted (sometimes with rather poor versions of the images) into the nineteenth century.

(20.) Augustine, 1857, 158-77. Augustine reads the psalm in terms of his concept of "two cities": Jerusalem, the soul's heavenly home, and Babylon, its earthly exile. A lengthy passage from Augustine is included in Quarles' emblem, after the poem, on the contrast between those who praise God from earthly exile and those fortunate enough to be able to praise him in heaven "face to face."

(21.) Quarles, 242.

(22.) As if the emblem were not dense enough, the woman is also a type of Job, faced by three venerable men in robes and turbans (standing for Eliphaz, Bildar, and Zophar), who seem to be offering consolation; she replies, in the poem's opening line, "Urge me no more."

(23.) Quarles, 242.

(24.) The echoes of Psalm 137 are noted by Braden, 27, and Manley, 168-79. See also Cartmell, 77-82.

(25.) As Cartmell notes, the vision of the fall of Babylon in Rev. 18: 2 is also important for this passage.

(26.) Of course, as Kugel shows, even first-century Jews interpreted "Babylon" as Rome, reading the psalm as prefiguring the destruction of the Second Temple (1994, 173-74). For one influential working out of the Rome-Babylon figure in Protestant terms, see Luther's anti-papal tract, On the Babylonian Captivity of the Church. Indeed, Luther quotes Psalm 137 in this context, followed by a puzzling curse -- "May the Lord curse the barren willows of those streams!" -- which may be explained as an allusion to Christ's cursing of the barren fig tree in Matthew 20, interpreted through one of Augustine's peculiar allegorizations from his commentary on Psalm 137 (Luther was, after all, an Augustinian friar). Augustine interprets the willows of Ps. 137:2 as men "thoroughly bad," so barren of "true faith and good works" that they are beyond hope. Of course, in the context of the crucial Reformation debate on faith versus works, Luther's reading of Augustine would obviously emphasize the former. See Luther, 209, and Aug ustine, 1857, 163.

(27.) Spenser, 232 (Ruines of Time, lines 1-2, 4). On memory, see below.

(28.) Ibid., 233 (lines 9, 12).

(29.) Ibid., 239 (line 141).

(30.) Ibid., 477.

(31.) Ibid., 208 ("November," line 141, "Here will I hang my pype upon this tree").

(32.) Faerie Queene, 2.12.80, cited in Parker, 55-66. On the translation of the instruments, see below.

(33.) 137:2, Geneva Bible (1560).

(34.) See Sachs, 106-08, and Werner.

(35.) See Jerome's two versions in Lefevre d'Etaples, and the Bibliorum pars tertia . . . translated by Junius and Tremellius. Cithara was, moreover, the term favoured by the Greek translators of the Septuagint in their rendering of kinnor. Sachs concludes that the kinnor and cithara were similar, small rounded lyres with strings suspended from a horizontal crossbar. As he notes, the Egyptians used the related term, k.nn.r for a lyre of this sort (107).

(36.) The proper tide of "Sternhold and Hopkins" is The Whole Booke of Psalmes. This was the most widely known metrical version of the Psalms in England, being published in over 700 editions between 1562 and 1696. For a study of the peculiar and impressive popularity of this psalter, see Hamlin.

(37.) For drawing my attention to this image (images of David and hanging harps are surprisingly scarce), I am indebted to Paula Loscocco. For a more detailed study of the image of hung-up davidic harps from 1649-60, see her forthcoming Eikonoklastic Song: Milton and Royalist Poetic.

(38.) On the history of the lute-song, see Spink, 1974, esp. chaps. 1 and 2. For a detailed study of the use of the lute-harp-lyre cluster in representations of music in English poetry, 1500-1700, see Hollander, 1961, 43-51, 128-45 and passim.

(39.) Quarles, 241.

(40.) Arwaker, 15 1-52. Arwaker's verse is "Englished" from the Latin emblem book of Herman Hugo (1588-1629), Pia desideria emblematis elegiis et affectibus (Antwerp, 1624), which also provided the images for Arwaker's version.

(41.) The description of the scene as "emblem" may derive from Elys or it may simply have become a commonplace, especially after Quarles. Saltmarsh also calls the hanging of the harps an "embleme."

(42.) Arwaker, 151-54. All italics original.

(43.) The importance for Medieval and Renaissance music theory of the tripartite division of music in Boethius' De Institutione Musica is discussed in Hollander, 1961, 24-26. I use these terms throughout for convenience and consistency, recognizing that the concepts so designated may have been diffetently named by some sixteenth- and seventeenth-century writers.

(44.) Davison, 424; Carew, 149.

(45.) Oldham, 140; Norris, 325.

(46.) Davison. 424; Carew, 149.

(47.) Fletcher, 253. Fletcher (1582-1650), like his brother Giles, was one of the "Spenserian" poets. His six metrical psalms were included in the Miscellanies appended to The Purple Island (1633)

(48.) Oldham, 140.

(49.) See Sachs, 402-03.

(50.) See The Hebrew-English Edition of the Babylonian Talmud, chap. I, 3b. I owe this reference to John Hollander.

(51.) The phenomenon of sympathetic vibration would have been familiar to any string player, as evidenced by Jacob Cats' emblem of love as sympathetic vibration between two identically-tuned lutes, reproduced in Hollander, 1961, between 242 and 243. For an English example, see Walton, 41, 'And, though 'tis most certain, chat two Lutes, being both strung and tun'd to an equal pitch, and then, one plaid upon, the other, chat is not totcht, being laid upon a Table at a fit distance, will (like an Eccho to a trumpet) warble a faint audible harmony, in answer to the same tune....

(52.) Saltmarsh, 1 (italics added).

(53.) See Hollander, 1961, 134 and 139, for instance, quoting Sir John Davies' punning on "Stoppes" and Sidney's on "divisions," respectively.

(54.) Campion, 74.

(55.) This pun is noted in Hollander, 1975, 80.

(56.) It should be noted that Edwin Sandys (parliamentarian, son of the Archbishop of the same name, and elder brother of George, the more famous translator of psalms) also uses "pensive" in his paraphrase of Psalm 137, but without the complexity of Campion's wordplay: "Ah, Sions wrongs to pensive minds appear...." Since Sandys' Sacred hymns was published in 1615, however, he may have borrowed the word from Campion's earlier publication and had some sense of the bilingual pun.

(57.) Ps. 137:5-6, KJV (1611).

(58.) E. Sandys, 125.

(59.) Crashaw, 105.

(60.) The form of the English Pindaric is usually only loosely based on its original, consisting mainly of a series of stanzas of irregular line lengths. See Fogle and Fry.

(61.) From "Preface to Eusebius," cited in Kugel, 1981, 152.

(62.) Watts, Reliquiae Juveniles (1734), cited in Davie, 211.

(63.) Fry, 9.

(64.) Ibid., 7.

(65.) Milton's Ode "On the Morning of Christ's Nativity," for instance, given its own chapter in Fry's study, is concerned with memory and music. When the poet calls "Ring out ye Crystal spheres" so that "Time will run back, and fetch the age of gold," he has in mind a scene of singing, "when of old the sons of morning sung,/ While the Creator Great/ His constellations set" (see Milton, 46). The poem attempts more than a simple recollection, however. Milton's call to the Muse to "prevent them [the "Star-led Wizards"] with thy humble ode," which is of course Milton's own far from humble one, uses "prevent" in a Latinate sense of praevenire, to come before (Milton, 43). A more radical temporal displacement than mere remembering seems to be implied.

(66.) Milton, 263 (PL.3.212).

(67.) McColley 1994. The most explicit allusions are Milton's "Hee Heav'n of Heavens and all the Powers therein (3.390) and "thy dear and only Son" (3.403) (see Milton, 267, 268). The Te Deum, in Coverdale's English, has "To thee al Angels cry aloud, the heavens and all the powers therein," and "Thy honourable, true, and onely sonne" (First and Second Prayer Books, 22, 23).

(68.) The psalm verses alluded to in the Te Deum are 28:9, 114:2, 123:3, 33:22, 31:1 and 71:1. See Julian, 1120-21. Julian traces allusions to the Vulgare in the Latin version of the hymn.

(69.) Milton, 268.

(70.) The Te Deum sets itself up in much the same way, a patristic hymn posing as a psalm, both by means of the allusions to psalms in its final section and also in the myth of its spontaneous and inspired composition by Ambrose and Augustine at the latter's baptism by the former. See the article "Te deum laudamus" in Julian.

(71.) First and Second Prayer Books, 22, 23.

(72.) Milton, 267, 268.

(73.) This is much the same strategy he uses in "At a Solemn Musick," at the end of which he looks forward "till God ere long/ To his celestial consort us unite,/ To live with him, and sing in endless morn of light" (Milton, 82). The first draft of this poem, rejected probably because of its extreme presumption, ended with "To live and sing with him "rather than "To live with him, and sing." Milton would like to be singing alongside of God, but, at this stage of his career, this seems brash even to him.

(74.) Ps. 137:4. Coverdale's Great Bible, (1539).

(75.) On the Renaissance humanists' sense of alienation from the classical culture to which they were drawn, see Greene. esp. chap. 2, "Historical Solitude;" on the alienation of sixteenth-century Reformers from the early Christian church and their attempt to overcome this alienation by writing a history of the true church through the Middle Ages, see Cameron.

(76.) Loe, sig. +4.

(77.) Ibid.

(78.) Campion, 74. Of course, what the Babylonians cannot "understand" probably also includes the culture and the religious beliefs and practices which go along with the language, but the linguistic strangeness seems the primary sense here, from which the others derive.

(79.) See Hallo.

(80.) Augustine, 1972, 656. For the history of Babel's fall, see bk. 16, chaps. 4-5.

(81.) Fletcher, 253.

(82.) The language here is similar to that of the angel announcing the fall of Babylon in the section on the fall of Lucifer in Fletcher's Purple Island (1633): "Babel, proud Babel's fall'n, and lies as low as ground" (in Grierson and Bullough, 217). In this case, there is a further rypological extension to the fall of Babylon in Revelation, which also recounts the defeat of the great dragon Satan (12:9).

(83.) Davison, 426; Carew, 149.

(84.) Shakespeare, 31. Subsequent citations from Richard II will be from this edition, and act, scene and line numbers will be given in the text.

(85.) This allusion is noted by both Shaheen (118) and Noble (158).

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

(87.) Bacon, 285.

(88.) Fletcher, 253.

(89.) Norris, 326.

(90.) Waller, 166.

(91.) Ibid., 167.

(92.) The work was published long after this, so whether Clarendon's account of the circumstances of the composition of the Contemplations can be trusted is an open question. The dating of the work to December 26, rather appropriately the feast of St. Stephen, the first martyr, may be cause for further suspicion. It is also noteworthy that, though the title of the work reads "Jersey. Dec. 26. 1647," the preface to his children describes the work as having begun in Spain, "in the time of a former Banishment." Whatever the details, the important point, clearly, is that Clarendon wished the Contemplations to be associated with the Royalist exile, and that Psalm 137 was useful to him in making this association.

(93.) Clarendon, 745.

(94.) Ibid. (italics original).

(95.) Ibid., 746.

(96.) Pelling, 2-3.

(97.) On the rabbinical interpretation see the reference to Kugel, 1994. above, n. 26.

(98.) Ps. 137:9, Geneva Bible (1560).

(99.) Lewis, 20.

(100.) Christopher Smart's 1765 translation, outside of the chronological scope of this study, is perhaps the boldest response, rewriting the final verse to praise as "greatest and the best" the man "who spares his enemies profest,/ And Christian mildness owns" (Smart, 247). A similar strategy of radical reinterpretation (or at least wishful thinking) seems to lie behind Bishop Arthur Lake's sermon calling for Christians to set aside their differences and follow the "compassionate disposition ... which appeared in the captive Jewes, when they said, If I forget thee O Jerusalem, let my right hand forget her cunning, if I doc not remember thee, let my tongue cleave to the roofe of my mouth, if I prefere not Jerusalem before my chiefest joy" (from Lake's sermon on Ps. 51:15, in Sermons with some religious and divine meditations [London, 1629], cited in McColley 1997,88). Lake could nor, of course, have known the uses to which Psalm 137 would be put in the Civil War, but he could hardly have been unaware of the d istinct lack of any "compassionate disposition" in the final curse of the psalm itself. I am indebted to Diane Kelsey McColley for this reference.

(101.) E. Sandys, 125.

(102.) Bacon, 285.

(103.) Oldham, 143.

(104.) Davie, 167, 112.

(105.) Augustine, 1857, 176.

(106.) Calvin, fol. 227.

(107.) On Calvin's notion of "perpetual warfare," see Bouwsma, 182-88.

(108.) Marshall, 11-12.

(109.) Cited in Hill, 112. I am indebted to Hill's discussion of the range of interpretation of biblical "Babylon" by Englishmen of all sorts

(110.) Donne, 91.

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