ABSTRACT
The metrical Sidney Psalter by Sir Philip Sidney and his sister, Mary Sidney Herbert, Countess of Pembroke, say Debra Rienstra and noel Kinnamon, “slips frustratingly in and out of familiar categories” (51; see Kinnamon ARC 2:2). indeed. The Book of Psalms is a collection of one hundred and fifty poems written in a mode not yet fully understood in Christian europe, but assumed to be metrical.1 The Psalter is biblical, yet not entirely unlike such later sequences as Ovid’s Amores or Petrarch’s Rime, and likewise expressing longing, complaint, anguish, distance, anger, love, and praise. As the editors of the Sidney Psalter observe, Psalms rivaled Petrarchan love poetry as the popular “lyric mode for english poets” (xii). A “lyric,” traditionally, is quasi-musical, something one might sing or chant to a lyre, and if personal (in fact or fiction) is also performative. Whether or not explicitly directed to the reader or listener, once circulated it is implicitly meant to be overheard by us, and even in some cases by god.
