The Prayers of the Psalter

by

Dom Henry Wansbrough

Excerpts from

'Metre of the Psalms'

The metre of Hebrew poetry is extremely difficult to judge. It is determined neither by number of syllables (like the classical Alexandrines or Hendekasyllabics) nor by length of syllable (like Greek or Latin metres), but by stressed syllables separated by varying numbers of unstressed syllables, like Gerard Manley Hopkins’ Binsey Poplars:

My aspens dear, whose airy cages quelled,
Quelled or quenched in leaves the leaping sun,
All felled, felled, are all felled;
Of a fresh and following folded rank
Not spared, not one
That dandled a sandalled
Shadow that swam or sank
On meadow and river and wind-wandering weed-winding bank.

But there are further difficulties in the corrupt state of the Hebrew text, which in innumerable examples makes it impossible to be sure exactly what was the original wording. Still further difficulties spring from our ignorance:

1. How was the poetry (and especially that of the psalms) performed?
2. Was there a limit to the number of unstressed syllables between stresses,
   or did a subsidiary stress intrude when a certain number of unstressed syllables was exceeded?
   Hopkins here never has more than 3 at a time, and in the brutal third line there is only one unstressed syllable.
3. Could a single word could ever bear two stresses?
4. Did little particles (yk and l, meaning roughly ‘to’ and ‘as’) count?
5. Was a regular number of stresses required? The Hopkins verse above has 5-5-5-4-2-2-3-5 stresses per line.

Despite such obscurities we can discern that the most common rhythms are

1. lines of two-plus-two (an energetic rhythm, like the 4:4 of a modern march - Psalm 28)
2. or three-plus-three (especially frequent in psalms of praise - Psalm 150),
3. or less frequently four-plus-four (most of Psalm 45), stresses each.
4. A frequent rhythm, normally associated with mourning, is the plaintive, qina-rhythm of 3 stresses followed by 2, in which the second line echoes and falls away from the first (so frequent in psalms of lament - Psalm 27).

References