Long since the day when the letters p,x and z first aspired to prime positions in polite literature we have learned that orthography is not child’s play. We happily think of psychology beginning with a p and we equally happily continue to deplore xenophobia. We give z an easier time because we like some of the words he leads – such as zoo and zero. We go easy with q because it belongs to a favoured pop group and it doesn’t go out much. Apart from the crusading George Bernard Shaw few have ventured to simplify the maze that is English spelling. On the face of it we could knock off the ps, abolish the x and retain the z as a kind of household pet.
The p in the front of psalms reminds us continually that we are dealing with a hymn-book from another culture. It was a culture that expected the arrival of the Messiah, that observed rigid dietary laws, that set great store by the Sabbath and above all saw itself as having been liberated from the Egyptian yoke and set up shop in a paradisal land.
In the English language the Psalms came to have a dominant place on a Sunday morning. Many would say that the Psalms are the best thing in the Bible. Even though they came before Christianity they enshrined or gave shape to a great many human experiences that are, like it or not, part of Christian worship. Many have been Anglicised and Christianised.
But the Psalms are not easy. It’s not just a language barrier, though the poetry of the Psalms takes the reader or singer through metaphors boldly as Coleridge did when he wrote ‘The Ancient Mariner’. Hebrew is another language altogether but the poetry of it poses the same difficulties for a newspaper-reader in either tongue. The pity of it is that much of the Bible is poetry.
So the Psalms are difficult and we don’t use them. It’s like having a Porsche (note the p) in the garage and never taking it out.
GRAY’S ELEGY
‘The curfew tolls the knell of parting day’ is the first line of one of the best known English poems. Written in 1750 by Thomas Gray, it mourns the passing of unknown local people in Stoke Poges who died unnoticed and uncelebrated. Gray is buried there.
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