This particular psalm composed by David, the warrior-poet-King of the nation of Israel, who was appointed by God to be His earthly shepherd over His chosen people; who was anointed by the prophet Samuel and described in I Samuel 16:12 as “ruddy, and withal of a beautiful countenance, and goodly to look to” (we think of Michelangelo’s David), not the tallest and kingliest in appearance, for the Lord “seeth not as a man seeth; for man looketh on the outward appearance, but the Lord looketh on the heart,” thus was David chosen, the least of his brethren who performed the lowliest of occupations, a shepherd, yet who killed a lion and a bear, and later Goliath; who, one night, as the army of Israel was away in battle, lingered at his castle and walked on his rooftop, spied Bathsheba bathing, commanded her to be brought to him, either raped or seduced her, arranged her husband Uriah’s murder because she was pregnant, then took her to wife; of whom it is said, served his generation well and whose heart was a heart after God’s; and from whose loins continued the lineage that culminated in Christ, the Son of David – this psalm is of unique importance and stands in the canon of great poetry.
There is no word, it is said by James Kugel in his book The Idea of Biblical Poetry, Parallelism and Its History, for “poetry” in biblical Hebrew (pg. 69), “thus to speak of ‘poetry’ at all in the Bible will be in some measure to impose a concept foreign to the biblical world.” However, it is commonly stated that a high percent of the bible is composed in poetic form. There are elements of what makes poetry, i.e. parallelism, symbolism, metaphor, simile, specific themes, a certain narration, pattern of lines, anaphora, etc.
As the hart panteth after the water brooks,
so panteth my soul after Thee, O God.
My soul thirsteth for God, for the living
God: when shall I come and appear before God?
My tears have been my meat day and
night, while they continually say unto me, “Where
is thy God?”
When I remember these things, I pour out
my soul in me: for I had gone with the multitude,
I went with them to the house of God, with the
voice of joy and praise, with a multitude that
kept holyday.
Why art thou cast down, O my soul?
and why art thou disquieted within me? hope
thou in God, for I shall yet praise Him for
the help of His countenance.
O my God, my soul is cast down within
me: therefore will I remember Thee from the land
of Jordan, and of the Hermonites, from the hill Mizar
Deep calleth unto deep at the noise of
Thy waterspouts: all Thy waves and Thy billows
are gone over me.
Yet the Lord will command His lovingkindness
in the daytime, and in the night His song shall be
with me, and my prayer unto the God of my life.
I will say unto God my rock, “Why hast Thou
forgotten me? why go I mourning because of the
oppression of the enemy?”
As with a sword in my bones, mine enemies
reproach me; while they say daily unto me, “Where
is thy God?”
Why art thou cast down, O my soul? and why
art thou disquieted within me? hope thou in God: for
I shall yet praise Him, who is the health of my
countenance, and my God.
The poem is a prayer and the prayer illustrates the psalmist’s ultimate yearning to be in the presence of God. This is his answering the call of God, which is the same call upon each believer, to be close to Him. The commencing lines exemplify the most desperate yearning any man has ever uttered in poetry, and it is to the Highest Beloved. The sound of the lines going into the reader’s ear set him running like the hart and to speak them takes the breath away, tiring him. The believer/speaker/reader is left exhausted right at the beginning. The lines are filled with energy that demands energy from the reader/speaker. The hart is the heart and the hart is one of the most delicate creatures; so the believer is a delicate creature that is exhausted and as the hart has reached its broken end, longing for refreshment, so too the psalmist has reached his end at the beginning of the poem. The period at the end of the first verse lets us rest to catch our breath. We are in the middle of something. Much has occurred previous to the opening lines. It is like Hemingway’s prose that opens and puts the reader in the middle of the action. It is like Homer’s Iliad that opens with the Greeks already involved in their ten-year war against the Trojans. Indeed, it is The Odyssey, for David, like Odysseus, is not where he wants to be. We see Odysseus waking out of the sensual rapture of the goddess Calypso, with whom he has been on her island, and thinking of home, Ithaca, and more importantly, of Penelope, his beloved, and crying after her.
Listen to the vowels coupling with the consonants and we hear the gallop of the hart in the forest over the soft wood and sharp stones. Hear the a’s and the t’s.
As the hart panteth after the water brooks,
so panteth my soul after Thee, O God.
Does the psalmist scream this line? It is certain that he does not say it in a low tone or a whisper. David will settle for nothing less than to be in God’s presence, hence the following line,
My soul thirsteth for God, for the living God, when
shall I come and appear before God?
“Now!” we seem to hear him demand. Is this not what God wants His children to desire, in fact, to demand, that they be in His presence always, to demand His presence, especially in the midst of wherever they are and whatever they are going through? To demand that He draw them closer to Him? Is not this our first calling in life? It has just occurred that “calling” in this instant is loaded. “Let us therefore come boldly unto the throne of grace, that we may obtain mercy, and find grace to help in time of need (Hebrews 4:16).
This question that David asks, to be in the presence of God, is the same that all poets have asked throughout the centuries. Indeed, it is each person’s if only innate desire to come into the presence of the Infinite. And it is this journey and the fulfillment thereof that Dante, who in Paradiso, confesses David as his true poetic guide, replacing Virgil who has been his guide throughout his journey, illustrated in La Divina Commedia. It is the demand that the Jesuit poet Gerard Manley Hopkins declares in To R.B., “I want the one rapture of an inspiration.” And want is a desperate word. Kerouac expressed this desire and sought out this presence/fulfillment through hijinks and drugs and travels back and forth across America, and Ginsberg in drugs and sex. John Berryman asks the same question in A Prayer After All,
Father, Father, I am overwhelmed.
Do you receive me back into Your sight?
This is mid-twentieth century David despairing. Also the questioning and protean Robert Lowell in Waking Early Sunday Morning, a poem of moral import that concludes on not the most positive note; but here is the question/demand,
When will we see Him face to face?
and he continues, turning his gaze earthward,
Each day He shines through darker glass.
In this small town where everything
is known, I see His vanishing
emblems, His white spire and flag-
pole sticking out above the fog, . . .
It is the fog of a man’s dying faith. And even earlier, like David demanding to be in the presence of God, Lowell opens his poem with the demand, “O to break loose, . . .” Though other writers might have substituted the biblical God for some other infinite presence, it was the exact question and yearning. It is also a wife asking/demanding of her husband why he has neglected her.
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