Diapasons Of Pure Poetry Poem by gershon hepner

the book of Psalms sings like an organ in the heart
with diapasons of pure poetry
the record of all feelings on and off the chart
played in the loft, the head, which is its major key.
Its chorus sings both hallelujah and amen,
and, introspective, it is often sad,
but readers tend to find it is most helpful when
they want to think God’s good though they feel bad.
Psalms taste like manna to each man what he likes best,
and to a valor woman they are worth
far more than rubies, for their value is assessed
above all food that heaven sends to earth.



Adam Kirsch reviews Robert Alter’s The Book of Psalms: A Translation with Commentary, in TNR, December 16,2007 (“Hallelujah”) :
'Whatever David says in his book pertains to himself, to all Israel, and to all times, ' declares Midrash Tehillim, the early rabbinic commentary on the Book of Psalms. If the rabbis erred, it was not on the side of exaggeration. It is not just Israel that placed the Book of Psalms, traditionally but falsely ascribed to King David, at the center of its spiritual vocabulary. These one hundred fifty poems had a definite and now somewhat unclear function in the rituals of the Temple in Jerusalem; and after the Temple was destroyed, and liturgy came to do the work of the altar, they migrated to the Jewish prayer service, where they are ubiquitous. To this day, Psalms is the book to which the devout most often turn, in joy and in sorrow. But it was Christianity, of course, that managed to disseminate the Psalms throughout Europe and the world, on a scale that their authors could never have imagined. In the Middle Ages, the Liturgy of the Hours consisted of eight daily services, each centered on the singing of a psalm, and monks took it upon themselves to recite the entire Latin Psalter every week. With the Reformation, these poems and hymns gained even larger audiences as they were translated into the European vernaculars. The Anglican Book of Common Prayer included the King James Version of the Psalter and provided for the full cycle to be read monthly, as well as assigning appropriate Psalms to each holiday. It is fair to say that as a result, from the sixteenth century through the twentieth, no lyrics were more widely or deeply read in Europe than the Psalms. For a reader of English literature, knowing the King James Psalter is as indispensable as knowing Shakespeare or Mother Goose: it is one of the diapasons of our poetry. It is not just the sheer familiarity of the Psalms, however, that explains their extraordinary influence. No less than the rabbis, the ministers, and the priests-as well as their ordinary congregants-insisted that the Psalms 'pertained to themselves.' These Hebrew texts, written by a series of anonymous poets at various times between 1000 and 400 B.C.E., seemed to generations of readers to be the very scripts of their own inner lives. Martin Luther, who translated the Psalter into German and used it as the basis for his hymns, wrote that 'this book, though small, deserves to be recommended above all others, ' since even for the ordinary, theologically unenlightened Christian it offered 'some little sweetness of the breath of life, and some small taste of consolation, like the faint fragrance which is found in the air not far from a bed of roses.' John Donne echoed the sentiment in a sermon preached at St. Paul's Cathedral in 1625. 'The Psalms are the Manna of the Church, ' he proposed. 'As Manna tasted to every man like that that he liked best, so do the Psalms minister instruction, and satisfaction, to every man, in every emergency and occasion.'


12/5/07