This Lonely House: Larkin's "Home is so Sad"

An other’s absence is difficult to endure. Everyone at sometime in his or her life experiences this. Whether it be the loss of someone because of death, a change of living residences, or the isolation one feels after a lover has left, nothing can replace that person. It is a uniqueness that cannot be replicated and the memories that have been left will always linger with the one who has stayed behind. Philip Larkin, in his poem Home is so Sad, beautifully portrays this experience.

                        Home is so sad. It stays as it was left,

                        Shaped to the comfort of the last to go

                        As if to win them back. Instead, bereft

                        Of anyone left to please, it withers so,

                        Having no heart to put aside the theft

                        And turn again to what it started as,

                        A joyous shot at how things ought to be,

                        Long fallen wide. You can see how it was:

                        Look at the pictures and the cutlery.

                        The music in the piano stool. That vase.

The rhyme pattern in both stanzas is ababa ababa. Larkin begins the poem by using the word home instead of house. The first sentence is very blunt, as Larkin does not refrain from giving the reader the full emotion he is about to illustrate and let us in on. For such a private poet it is an open statement. He does not even bother to compare it by saying it is as sad as something else, no simile necessary. It wasn’t just a house, which is just a building in which people reside. It was a home in which there were people who cared for and loved each other. This is the difference between the two words. He then goes on give us the current emotion that is present, sadness – it is an utter desolation, really; this is shown by using the adverb so, as it intensifies sad. Home is not just sad, it is so sad, so very sad. It is also a full sentence in itself.

            Next, Larkin describes the manner in which the home remains. Nothing has been removed or altered since someone left – “It stays as it was left” – and there is no intention on the person who is left behind to change anything. There is a reason for this lack of alteration in the space, the main one being the fear of erasing a specific memory of the one who is no longer there. But Larkin also tells us the other reason, as there is some hope of the person’s return, with the space “[s]haped the comfort of the last to go/As if to win them back.” There is that flicker of hope that the person may return and fill the space that is now vacated.

            However, what hope there might have been is hopeless, and the poet goes on to imply such. He uses the effective word bereft, which both fulfills the rhyme pattern and because of its meaning. It isn’t just an absence that is being endured; it means being deprived or lacking of something and when applied to a person, it means lonely and abandoned. The full line reads “Instead, bereft/Of anyone left to please, it withers so[.]” It is significant that the line break comes at bereft, because what follows on the page is blankness, the blankness that is present due to the absence of the person who is no longer there. The home that is left unchanged and in which the person who is left had some hope to win that person back, is now in a state of decline. The dust is left where it settled. The fifth and last line in the stanza then continues, “Having no heart to put aside the theft[.]” And that is what it feels like, a theft, when the significant other has been taken from someone. Even though death is part of life and is natural, this theft always feels unnatural. The theft cannot be forgotten, it cannot be put aside, as it were, as if it were a trivial thing. It is consequential that not only the line, but the stanza, ends with theft because the space that follows the word on the page and breaks the two stanzas reveals the emptiness that is there after the theft – the crime – that occurred.

            The second stands begins with a continuation of the line, “And turn again to what it started as,” which is understood in the whole to mean that there was an attempt to return to things as normal, but this is impossible, no matter how one tried. And turn to what? “A joyous shot at how things ought to be,” at how one hoped things should have been, without such loss. But this joyous shot leads to nowhere and in fact it fails and has “[l]ong fallen wide” of its mark. The third line in this stanza resembles the third line in the first stanza with the first half being the end of one sentence and the second half beginning another one.

            The poet then brings the reader in by using the second person pronoun, besides it just being colloquial speech, and he then points to everything in the room as they have been left, everything with a reference to what was, “You can see how it was:” he says, “This is how is used to be when [NAME HERE] was here.” And then he tells us what to look at as he says, “Look at the pictures and the cutlery./The music in the piano stool. That vase.” The things he points out are just things, but they are things with a history, things that were parts of a life that is now utterly changed. The pictures in which there are moments that will be forever remembered still hang on the walls. The cutlery that was used for meals with that someone just lies on the table next to the dishes on a table remaining set and decorated as in many houses, as well cutlery being displayed in a bureau. Then there are the sheets of music that is left unplayed in the piano stool that has not been sat on. This was music that was shared between lovers. Now there is silence and the piano is untouched, the keys covered. And most heartbreaking is the last sentence that consists of only two words, “That vase.” It is offhanded and pained at the same time. One sees an empty vase standing on a table, its mouth open and surrounded by air – emptiness that fills the room.

Shared Sunlight: The Eternal Link in "Midsummer"

We live, consciously and unconsciously, and whether we want to admit it or not, under two influences, tradition and instinct. In Midsummer, Walcott manages to incorporate both of these influences in stanzas the subject of which is life. “Wherever a thought can go back seventy years/there is hope for tradition in these tropical islands[,]” and the series of poems opens with a stanza that links the New World archipelago of the West Indies to the Old World with rhyme that is both perfect and off.

                        The jet bores like a silverfish through volumes of cloud –

                        clouds that will keep no record of where we have passed,

                        nor the sea’s mirror, nor the coral busy with its own

                        culture; they aren’t doors of dissolving stone,

                        but pages in a damp culture that come apart.

                        So a hole in their parchment opens, and suddenly, in a vast

                        dereliction of sunlight, there’s that island known

                        to the traveller Trollope, and the fellow traveller Froude,

                        for making nothing. Not even a people. The jet’s shadow

                        ripples over green jungles as steadily as a minnow

                        through seaweed. Our sunlight is shared by Rome

                        and your white paper, Joseph. Here, as everywhere else,

                        it is the same age. In cities, in settlements of mud,

                        light has never had epochs. Near the rusty harbor

                        around Port of Spain bright suburbs fade into words –

                        Maraval, Diego Martin – the highways long as regrets,

                        and steeples so tiny you couldn’t hear their bells,

                        nor the sharp exclamations of whitewashed minarets

                        from green villages. The lowering window resounds

                        over pages of earth, the canefields set in stanzas.

                        Skimming over an ocher swamp like a fast cloud of egrets

                        are nouns that find their branches as simply as birds.

                        It comes too fast, this shelving sense of home –

                        canes rushing the wing, a fence; a world that still stands as

                        the trundling tires keep shaking and shaking the heart.

The stanza and the emotion, as well as the imagination ranging throughout time and place, are contained not by meter but by rhyme – cloud/Froude/mud; passed/vast; own/stone/known; apart/heart; shadow/minnow; Rome/home; words/birds; regrets/minarets/egrets; bells/else; stands as/stanzas; the only two words not finding any company in even the slightest rhyme are harbor and resounds. Because of the immense topic he commences upon in this first stanza the boundary of rhyme is necessary; without it the stanza, and the series of poems as a whole would appear as just lines without any definition or even virtue. Yes, virtue, for the belief in and obedience to rhyme or any traditional form displays to the reader a sense of humility and obeisance on the poet’s part to the language that is larger and older than himself. It is similar to the worshipper humbly praying to God; the supplicant’s ego or personality is present yet he realizes that he must approach the Godhead in the attitude of humility and that he realizes himself fully only when he realizes himself in God, realizing his full potential and identity only after dying away in God Who fills the supplicant with Himself. But it is not merely that the supplicant’s identity is erased, because his uniqueness is not erased; rather, it is the selfish ego that is erased whereas the individuality is retained. 

            It is often said that the societies of the West Indian islands lack any history, and therefore lack any significant culture they can call their own. Without going too far off of my theme, an objection to this common belief of the lack of history must be raised. History in the Caribbean does not begin at the end of the fifteenth century; the native history goes back centuries; but the cultural history, that with which the late Trinidadian writer C.L.R. James and others are concerned, is a continuation of and is one of the branches in the long history of Europe and Africa. Those who settled in the West Indies from Britain, Spain, France, Portugal, etc., and those who were brought over from Africa as slaves, and those indentured from Asia following emancipation, even those from the Middle East, all brought with them their cultural traditions and over time, as they have blended together, for the most part harmoniously, a new culture was given birth in each island. Our heritage is undoubtedly linked to theirs; and in a nation like Trinidad and Tobago, as well as other English-speaking islands, the culture and history is shaped, influenced and defined by the achievements of the British Empire and the simple fact that English is the national language, the language of Marlowe, Kyd, Shakespeare, Milton and so many others; also by the form of government, parliamentary democracy. Contemporary Trinidadians can look back hundreds of years for a tradition.

            In his famous book on cricket, Beyond a Boundary, the late Trinidadian author C.L.R. James wrote (and it must be quoted in his own words), when explicating the intimate relationship between cricket and West Indian social and political life, and the reaction of the crowd in the Queen’s Park Oval on 30^th January 1960 when they threw bottles on to the field during a match between the West Indies and the Marylebone Cricket Club (M.C.C.) team from England as they deeply believed that one of the local players received an unjust judgment against him from a local umpire (local umpires were seen as being harsher on the local players): "West Indians crowding to Tests bring with them the whole past history and future hopes of the islands. English people, for example, have a conception of themselves breathed from birth. Drake and mighty Nelson, Shakespeare, Waterloo, the Charge of the Light Brigade, the few who did so much for so many, the successes of parliamentary democracy, those and such as those constitute a national tradition. Underdeveloped countries have to go back centuries to rebuild one. We of the West Indies have none at all, none that we know of."

            Cricket defined a people who believed they had no history they can claim, even a game that was born in the culture and country of the colonizers. Cricket gave the people character, and because their society has given birth to talented players who excel at this game created by the colonizers, challenging and even triumphing against the game’s creators, the populace seek a sort of refuge in it and desire that it be played according to the rules that are in place to ensure fairness and equality on the field, a fairness and equality they saw as lacking in life outside of cricket.

            The literary tradition that existed in Walcott's own country, and in the West Indies as a whole, can fairly said to have commenced in the early twentieth century, two of the leading figures being St.-John Perse and Aimé Cesairé; yet this tradition has its roots in the European literary tradition. His understanding of this is what makes Walcott aware of his own place, i.e. a twentieth-century West Indian writer writing on a Caribbean island whose verses and the language he employs are connected to and connects him to Rome, and Brodsky (another poet loyal to traditional forms), under shared sunlight; and there is no attempt at all to attain that heresy of Originality. A poet is original only in the sense of personal experience, yet even these experiences, because they are human experiences are universal and timeless, thus connecting our contemporary suffering selves to those suffering selves throughout history; and the originality of a poet shows in the language he uses to describe those experiences/imaginings/desires into verse, using a language that is his own diction, while at the same time it has been used for centuries, though the dialect might be different, even if only fifty years apart from him. Because of this historical sense, no poet can ever strive to be Original; he will only end in implosion.

            “Our sunlight is shared by Rome/and your white paper, Joseph[,]” and here is the shared sunlight of the antique act of writing poetry (that connects Walcott – and Brodsky – to their poetic predecessors), thus showing Walcott’s sense, not only of his times, but also of those in his time. To use the line again, “Wherever a thought can go back seventy years/there is hope for tradition in these tropical islands[,]” along with the use of rhyme, is Walcott’s refutation of both Trollope and Froude, and others who say that the West Indies lacks culture. “There’s that island known/to the traveller Trollope, and the fellow traveller Froude,/ for making nothing. Not even a people.” Yet, by the very act of using rhyme and the making of a poem, there is evidence that the West Indies has given birth to a culture that is original in its own way, while connected to the Old World (“Our sunlight is shared by Rome"), thus there is tradition; and using rhyme as a limiting force to guide his poem, Walcott gives a shape to a culture that is, like all others, organic and formless by nature.

Gone Fishin': Yeats' Poetic Idyll

“I’d rather be fishing” – a popular bumper sticker that comes to the reader’s mind at the end of Yeats’ The Fisherman. The image he conjures up is that of an idyllic figure he wishes to write a proper poem in honour of. But here is the full poem.

                        Although I can see him still,

                        The freckled man who goes

                        To a grey place on a hill

                        In grey Connemara clothes

                        At dawn to cast his flies,

                        It’s long since I began

                        To call up to the eyes

                        This wise and simple man.

                        All day I’d looked in the face

                        What I had hoped ‘twould be

                        To write for my own race

                        And the reality;

                        The living men that I hate,

                        The dead man that I loved,

                        The craven man in his seat,

                        The insolent unreproved,

                        And no knave brought to book

                        Who has won a drunken cheer,

                        The witty man and his joke

                        Aimed at the commonest ear,

                        The clever man who cries

                        The catch-cries of the clown,

                        The beating down of the wise

                        And great Art beaten down.

                        Maybe a twelvemonth since

                        Suddenly I began,

                        In scorn of this audience,

                        Imagining a man,

                        And his sun-freckled face,

                        And grey Connemara cloth,

                        Climbing up to a place

                        Where stone is dark under froth,

                        And the down-turn of his wrist

                        When the flies drop in the stream;

                        A man who does not exist,

                        A man who is but a dream;

                        And cried, ‘Before I am old

                        I shall have written him one

                        Poem maybe as cold

                        And passionate as the dawn.’

The poem is 40 lines long and is comprised of three sentences. The first stanza contains the first two sentences, which are eight lines long and sixteen lines long respectively; the second stanza is therefore sixteen lines in length. Yeats opens the poem with such detail and the reader is appreciative for it because he can see the imagery, and this is all the more important to know because the poet implies that he is not writing from sight but from memory – ‘Although I can see him still’. He then goes on to describe the imagery for the reader, displaying his sharp recollection of details: ‘The freckled man who goes/To a grey place on a hill/In grey Connemara clothes . . .’ (Connemara is an area in County Galway). Here we have the person, place and dress all given to the reader. It is detailed enough without being too much so. It also fits in with the idyllic imagery that one would call up of the Irish countryside and one of its inhabitants. Following this detail, we then are given the time of day and the purpose for his being where he is: ‘At dawn to cast his flies . . .’ That one line contains so much information for the reader. We are reminded again that what is being described is from the poet’s memory: ‘It’s long since I began/To call up to the eyes . . .’ In the first line ‘see’ was used figuratively and colloquially; we use ‘see’ to imply that we remember something or someone when we say “Although it’s been quite some time, I can see so-and-so still clearly.” Yeats continues the figurative language with ‘call up to the eyes’. Following this, the poet then gives us something of the man’s character, calling him ‘This wise and simple man.’ This is important, as we will later see; and this ends the first sentence.

            The next sentence begins with Yeats’ contemplating the ideal face with the ambition of writing a poem that would be suitable for his (Yeats) people and their reality. From here on, the language becomes strong and he describes the reality and the people inhabiting it, which contrasts with the ideal of the fisherman: “The living men that I hate,/The dead man that I loved,/The craven man in his seat . . .’ These descriptions now give the reader a contrasting imagery from that of the opening few lines. You thought you were going to read a quieter poem, but you’re in the daily rambunctiousness of life and its participants. He uses words that are blunt: hate, love, craven, insolent, knave, witty, commonest, clever. He has no love for his contemporaries for he has experienced a great disappointment and the men he loved are those who are dead. He looks around and finds no one worthy of his affections and trust.

            In his society, he sees insolent men never corrected, craven men remaining where they are, knaves behaving as they want to, witty men whose speech is vulgar, clever (as in smart arse or unethically so) men behaving as clowns, the wise disrespected and Art – culture – torn down and no longer studied for its inherent value to society. No wonder he chooses to turn his thoughts away to an idyllic image. We have read such language in other poems, notably Easter, 1916, written after this poem. But the sentiment is the same, Yeats’ affection for his people and experiences of utter disappointment and hurt. As the saying goes, where there is great disappointment there is great love.

            The second stanza, and in effect the third line of the poem begin with Yeats’ giving us the length of time since he began writing the poem – ‘Maybe a twelvemonth since/Suddenly I began, . . .’, thus he has been carrying around this imagery in his mind for approximately a year, along with the words that he couldn’t fashion a complete poem with. His next line tells us partly why he began to think upon this idyllic imagery – ‘In scorn of this audience,’ – the contemporaries he hates. Again, another hard word is employed, scorn.

            We have more detail of the man’s face given to us, which is imagined, as the poet informs us: ‘Imagining a man,/And his sun-freckled face,/And grey Connemara cloth[.]’ We then follow the fisherman on his purposeful walk in the Irish countryside to a place, that is not named, and which is hidden away and among the lively waters whose stones are ‘dark under froth[.]’ Yeats then supplies the reader with another detail that is so intimate and true that only a fisherman, or one who knows the actions of the casting a line, can write: ‘And the down-turn of the wrist/When the flies drop in the stream[.]’ That is beautiful and simple all at once.

            The reader has been remembering the fisherman all along and because of the detail Yeats has provided, he seems real; however, Yeats surprises us by confessing that such a fisherman does not exist at all, now confirming his ‘Imagining a man’ a few lines earlier in the stanza: ‘A man who does not exist,/A man who is but a dream[.]’ We remember that in the first stanza Yeats was blunt in his statement ‘The living men that I hate,’ thus it is understood that no one alive can fit into his idyll and no one is worthy of his affections, furthermore of his poem. It is only an imaginary man that the poet feels is suitable for the lines has wanted to write. It is calm, imaginary Ireland.

            The poem then closes with the poet’s cry of determination in writing the poem before the vision fades: ‘And cried, ‘Before I am old/I shall have written him one/Poem maybe as cold/And passionate as the dawn.’ Yeats admits the failure or limitation of language with ‘maybe’, as in his poem may not live up to a true reflection of his vision and imagination.

The Anguished Heart: Psalm 42 and the Journey of Desperation, Part 3

But in an instant the poem drops degrees in speed, diving back down into the depths as we see the psalmist standing in the middle of utter chaos billowing around him. The image here reminds us of Israel crossing the Red Sea as its walls of water are standing on their sides and thundering all night. One part of the depth calls/thunders to the other part, deafening and silencing the psalmist. One also thinks of the disciples in the boat with Jesus as He is asleep and the storm is fierce around their boat and they are sore afraid. And then there is another similar image of Odysseus in the midst of Zeus’ waves and billows and waterspouts. He is not yet home in Ithaca, but has been washed ashore after being freed by Calypso per Athena’s supplication to her father Zeus who then sends Hermes to tell the seductress of his command. His lone craft is broken up by a storm that Poseidon unleashed in revenge for the hero’s putting out his son’s, the Cyclops, eye. Here, in the land of the Phaiakians, he is recounting a part of his journey previous to his time under Calypso’s seductions to King Alkinoos,

                        Now Zeus the lord of cloud roused in the north

                        a storm against the ships, and driving veils

                        of squall moved down like night on land and sea.

                        The bows went plunging at the gust; sails

                        cracked and lashed out strips in the big wind.

                        We saw death in that fury, . . .

The psalmist here, like Odysseus, is but a speck, and insignificant more so, in the presence of such awesome power. Everything is really out of control and spinning around him, his world beyond his grasp, the power of nature that makes one humble and remember he is but mortal and weak. In painting, it is J.M.W. Turner’s Snow Storm. But these waves and these waterspouts, the psalmist says, are God’s, thy waterspouts, thy waves and thy billows, like Zeus. He knows that God still holds the reins of nature. What is pictured is that of one in the presence of the Sublime, that which inspires in us awe and the instinct for self-preservation, as Edmund Burke described it: “Whatever is fitted in any sort to excite the ideas of pain and danger, that is to say, whatever is in any sort terrible, or is conversant about terrible objects, or operates in a manner analogous to terror, is a source of the sublime. I say the strongest emotion because I am satisfied the ideas of pain are much more powerful than those which enter on the part of pleasure. Without all doubt, the torments which we may be made to suffer are much greater in their effect on the body and mind, than any pleasures which the learned voluptuary could suggest, or than the liveliest imagination, and the most sound and exquisitely sensible body, could enjoy.” And the Sublime is usually something of and with magnanimous force and power. This is David face to face with it in its awesomeness and awe-fulness.

            Verse eight answers verse seven as the psalmist, despite being in the midst of this dark night, is certain that God will not forget him, that He will command His lovingkindness. Thus shall David sing of his God in the night, His song shall be with me, His song that becomes David’s song, which is his praise and prayer. And what shall that prayer be? We get the answer in the next verse,

                                    I will say unto God my rock, “Why hast Thou

                        forgotten me? why go I mourning because of the oppression

                        of the enemy?”

This is not just prayer, this is conversation, even more, it is questioning God’s providence. Does not God welcome these bold questions? Does He not want us to ask them? After all, a true relationship is one in which questions are welcomed. David is broken. Does God not want us at this point? It is at this point at which He works His work in us. This question echoes Eloi, Eloi, lama sabacthani? which is My God, my God, why hast Thou forsaken me? which opens Psalm 22 and which is what Christ screamed out when He was on the cross. The enemies are they that taunted and mocked Him. And we also remember verse three when David says he was taunted. And we also think of David taunting himself with whispers of doubt, and even screams, too. It is a man confronting himself and his faith. Is it real? Is God real? Has he wasted his time believing in God? Should he continue to believe in God? Verse ten presents us with another Christ image. The metaphorical sword that David says pierces his bones becomes the real spear that pierced Christ’s side at the crucifixion. And the mocking continues. Again, it is the above-mentioned neglected wife wanting an answer from her husband as she is made fun of by others, “where is your husband?”

            Verse eleven brings us to the end of this journey of desperation with the psalmist still questioning himself. He is still caught up in this psychological/spiritual battle. But he reassures himself and turns his concentration outward and upward to think on God. It is the action of not focusing on one’s situation, whatever it may be, and to look upon God’s faithfulness. I shall yet praise, I will praise, for David is not yet praising, but intends to. Intention is an important aspect, it means and counts for a great deal; it directs. The poem’s journey has been from one of the poet screaming out in isolation desiring ascendancy into God’s presence, and being thrown into the midst of utter chaotic straits, and then to a calmness at the finale in which he is sure of God’s eventual presence and his being brought into God’s presence. And of God’s acknowledging him, approving his existence: I shall yet praise Him, who is the health of my countenance and my God. As a lover see his beloved’s face and is nourished, so to say, by her appearance, so will the psalmist be nourished by God’s face.

            Is not this how the journey really is? There are the heights and the lows, the moments of being on Hill Mizar and then being in the grave, as it were, and this poem is calling, more accurately, screaming from the grave. It is a poem of utter psychological wildness and spiritual desolation and upheaval. It possesses all that the most valuable and successful poetry strives to possess, truth, earnest desire for it, questioning and questing, doubt, trust, emotional and mental traversing, and then a hint of certainty at the end (even if we are not there yet). It is Odysseus’ journey in eleven verses. It is Odysseus knowing that he will finally be restored to his rightful place with his wife, Penelope, after ten years of wandering and being tossed by the gods and the elements and reaching home to Ithaca, and then having to battle her suitors; it is Odysseus, at home, in truth. It is David looking forward to his standing on Hill Mizar. It is the wife no longer neglected by her husband. The presence of God and restoration is coming at the end, somewhere beyond the end of the words.

The Anguished Heart: Psalm 42 and the Journey of Desperation, Part 2

Verse three finds us hearing of David’s days and nights of lamenting. We have come to know David’s personality as one that was intense and it is assumed that he experienced severe depression. The psychological aspect in this psalm is all too necessary. The only sustenance, which does not sustain, has been his tears and we refer back to line one on the thirsting soul/heart/hart. He, David, has been the victim of reproaches, cruel taunting, etc., by his enemies and his (supposed) friends and others who were following him as they now see misfortune. But those voices may be David’s own as in despair he hears voices of doubt in his mind questioning God’s providence and faithfulness. The question, “Where is thy God?” reminds us of his own question in line two and if we substitute thy with my we get it all over again. And the mocking of David foreshadows Christ being mocked by the high priests, the Jewish populace and Roman soldiers years later on the cross.

            Verse four lets the reader enter David’s memory as he recalls days when he felt and knew God’s presence. Like the wife who recalls the ceremony of marriage and the sweet days previous to this state of being neglected, it was a voice that was part of a community that praised God with joy and knowledge of Him. Now, his voice is one in isolation, like that crying in the wilderness we later come to learn of; but it is not a prophetic voice preparing the way for his God, rather it is one that laments the absence of God. But David does not give in to despair, however, as there is the underlying belief in God, the living God, as stated in line two.

            The poem then turns to the inside, focusing on the self, the psychological/emotional/spiritual as David looks into himself and asks himself, “Why art thou cast down, O my soul? and why art thou disquieted within me?” Yet David refuses to pity himself. What he instead does is turn his thoughts unto God, remembering Him and he encourages himself to “hope thou in God” and from this there is the intention to pray to and praise Him. I shall yet praise Him, I will praise God in the midst of this and after this is over, whatever it is. We don’t know at what time in David’s life this psalm was composed.

            . . . for the help of His countenance ought to call to mind for us Exodus 33 when Moses asked God to show him His glory. And God, it is said, spoke to Moses face to face, hence acknowledging Moses. A relationship is that in which we know each other face to face. Thus David seeks God’s acknowledgement of his existence, approval of him.

            This turn in his psychological privation, from the “dark night of the soul” to hoping in God is unrivalled. He remembers God’s faithfulness, the help of His countenance. And verse six echoes verse five, but takes it even further. The psalmist knows his deliverance will come. The poem’s journey from verse five to verse six has gone from the inner man and his privation to the outward celebration of future deliverance and one from the depths to the heights. We see David standing on the plain in Jordan, then climbing the heights of Hermon and then to stand on Hill Mizar; and his mind has traveled further, beyond his circumstance, and beyond this world even, for it remembers God, as well as into the past and into the future. And it is Odysseus restored to his rightful place as king after his ten-year voyage back from Troy, with Penelope his queen at his side, her suitors defeated. (For Dante, however, Odysseus never comes “home,” to the truth, and he places him in the eighth circle of L’Inferno.)