Repentance in the Countess of Pembroke's Psalms of David
Chad Engbers, Professor of English
Minds in the Making

This paper was presented at the Modern Language Association convention in Washington D.C., in December 2005.

Psalm 51 was traditionally understood as King David's repentance for sleeping with Bathsheba and sending her husband to certain death on the battlefield. In verse 5, however, David laments not his sinful choices but his sinful nature. Sixteenth-century Protestants frequently returned to this verse as an illustration of original sin. Anne Vaughan Lock's rendition, which appears on the appendix, is quite grim:

She writes:

For lo, in sinne, Lord, I begotten was,
With sede and shape my sinne I toke also,
Sinne is my nature and my kinde alas,
In sinne my mother me conceived: Lo
I am but sinne, and sinfull ought to dye,
Dye in his wrath that hath forbydden sinne.

The version by Mary Sidney Herbert, Countess of Pembroke, is noticeably less dour:

My mother, loe! When I began to be,
Conceaving me, with me did sinne conceave:
And as with living heate shee cherisht me
Corruption did like cherishing receave.

The differences between the two versions are immediately apparent. Lock repeats the words "sin" and "dye"; Pembroke repeats "cherish" and "conceive." These lines are typical of the larger differences between Lock and Pembroke, differences that Margaret Hannay has summarized in this way: "Lock, like [John] Calvin, stresses original sin and the need for abject penitence. While the countess includes these elements, her version stresses the joy and health that comes from God's mercy. Typically, Lock stresses the negative aspects and the countess the positive aspects of the same doctrine" (67).

Hannay's point is undeniably true. It is not, however, the whole truth. Pembroke's translation of Psalm 51 is lighter than Lock's, but most translations of Psalm 51 are lighter than Lock's. We can get a more accurate sense of Pembroke's achievement as a poet if we extend our comparison to include a broader range of her sources. The appendix extends the comparison to two sixteenth-century psalters: Miles Coverdale's translation-first written in the 1530's but eventually attached to The Book of Common Prayer -and The Geneva Bible of 1560.

If we compare Pembroke's psalms to these more common sources, we notice two things. First, we see that Pembroke has not merely emphasized mercy and joy, but that she has also amplified the imagery of sinfulness and repentance. In fact, we see that her version of Psalm 51 is in some ways closer to Anne Lock's version than it is to either Coverdale or Geneva . Second, we hear Pembroke writing penitential tones into psalms that are not traditionally associated with repentance-introducing into these poems shadows that do not appear in her sources.

She frequently roots even her most joyful psalms in the dark soil of human weakness and need.

One example appears in the very next verse of Psalm 51. V erses 5 and 6 of this psalm form the two halves of an antithesis. Verse 6 explains the poet's sinful nature ; verse 6 explains his holy nurturing through education. Pembroke writes:

but loe, thie love to purest good doth cleave,
and inward truth: which hardlie els discerned,
my trewand soule in thie hid schoole hath learned.

Two things are significant about Pembroke's translation.

First is the word "trewand," or "truant," which meant the same thing in the sixteenth century that it does today. The Oxford English Dictionary defines the noun "truant" as "A lazy, idle person; esp. a child who absents himself from school without leave." [The earliest example of this term is from 1449, when a man named Reginald Pecock referred to "Truauntis in the scole of God."] The point is that Pembroke has expanded the teaching metaphor to include not only a "hid school" but also a truant soul.

None of her sources emphasize the soul's academic delinquency at this precise point in the poem. Lock, Coverdale and Geneva all suggest that class is being taught by a master teacher, and that the student has no choice but to learn. Pembroke's scholar, on the other hand, is prone to skipping school altogether. This brings her version much closer, at least in tone, to Lock's version, which emphasizes that the psalmist is learning about.sin-a heavier sounding lesson plan than the "wisdom" being taught in Coverdale and Geneva.

But Lock does not portray a truant psalmist. Her poet diligently studies his own sin-but at least he is diligently studying. Pembroke presents sin not merely as a subject of study, but as a sort of learning disability.

In short, Pembroke might soften the rather hard doctrine of original sin in verse 5, but she also complicates the second half of the antithesis in verse 6. She does this by underlining the psalmist's tendency to resist instruction. Perhaps we could say that Pembroke's notion of original sin is wider than it is in Coverdale and Geneva , and deeper than it is in Lock. She extends original sin into both verses, and she understands it as a systemic problem in the psalmist himself, not merely a concept that is on the psalmist's mind.

I do not want to overemphasize the effect of this one word. By the end of the line, even this truant soul "hath learned." That, after all, is the point of the verse. The word "trewand" does not completely compromise the psalmist's education; it merely creates tension between the teaching God and the truant student. And this is a productive tension. Ultimately, Pembroke makes it even more remarkable that this soul has learned something. It takes a mighty teacher indeed to teach even those who do not come to class.

Hannibal Hamlin's book Psalm Culture and Early Modern English Literature talks about how important the first few verses of this psalm were to Martin Luther-who saw in them a great gulf between the sinning psalmist and the forgiving God. For Luther-and for John Calvin, for that matter-this gulf testifies to the greatness of God's grace by showing just how far down that grace must extend.

The second interesting feature of Pembroke's verse six is so obvious that it is easy to overlook. She focuses on the delinquent student, whereas both Coverdale and Geneva focus on the master teacher. The grammatical subject in Coverdale and Geneva is "thou"; the subject in Pembroke's psalm is "my trewand soule." She not only adds truancy to this verse, but she shows the entire situation from the truant's point of view.

(Lock's version seems to work in both points of view, which she can do because she is devoting an entire sonnet to each verse.)

The appendix to this paper shows an excerpt from Psalm 130, another of the Penitential Psalms, where see Pembroke doing the same two things we have just seen in Psalm 51. First, she adds a concrete image of sin, a blot that appears nowhere in any of her sources. Second, she again clarifies the rhetorical situation, this time by emphasizing the divine audience of the psalm. It is not " his word" on which her psalmist depends; it is " thy word." The soul that is defaced by a sinful blot is face to face with God.

In short, Pembroke does much more than accentuate the positive elements in her penitential psalms. She maintains a strong but subtle sense of original sin, even in passages describing forgiveness. She adds concrete imagery to illustrate the sinfulness of the psalmist, and she clarifies the rhetorical situation of her psalms-putting that sinful psalmist into direct dialogue with God. Together, these choices work to build dramatic tension between sinner and savior.

Lyn Bennett's recent book Women Writing of Divinest Things compares Pembroke to earlier poets such as Wyatt and Gascoigne, and concludes that Pembroke paints dramatic pictures where they preach pedantic sermons. She writes, "Pembroke's psalm dramatizes the speaker's situation while Wyatt's and Gascoigne's speakers spend a great deal more time and energy explaining it" (51). That may not be a fair description of Wyatt, but it is exactly what I am describing in Pembroke.

Now, it should come as no surprise that Pembroke amplifies the penitential elements in Penitential Psalms. What is surprising about her psalter is that she occasionally introduces penitential tones into psalms that do not seem terribly penitential. Psalm 89, for example, is a psalm of praise. In line 1, Pembroke uses the word "graces" to describe God's goodness. At first glance, this seems extremely positive. If we compare this line to Coverdale, however, we notice something interesting: where Pembroke has "graces," Coverdale has only "loving kindness."

There is an important theological difference between grace and kindness. Grace suggests both sin and forgiveness. Loving kindness may be extended to anyone at any time, but grace is given to those who have sinned. In other words, "grace" is a loaded word: it emphasizes forgiveness but implies former sin-as does the word "mercies" in the Geneva Bible . Of course "grace" and "mercy" are lighter words compared to the diction of, say, Lock-but they are heavier words than Pembroke frequently found in her sources. When the term "loving kindness" appears in Coverdale or the Geneva Bible , Pembroke typically translates it either as "mercy" or "grace." She simply prefers these more loaded terms.

In Psalm 89, she unpacks some of that load, adding the idea that God's grace makes us indebted to him. This idea-found in none of her usual sources-makes the psalmist's position much more vulnerable. Just as Psalm 51 dramatizes the perspective of a truant soul, so this line clearly shows grace from a distinctly human point of view. Grace pays our debt of original sin, but it incurs further debts of gratitude, devotion, and praise. Pembroke's verse guards against what Dietrich Bonhoeffer has called "cheap grace." Grace is not something to be taken lightly, or taken for granted. It implies sin in the psalmist's past, and it obligates the psalmist in the present and future.

The psalmist in this verse is not repenting of particular sins, but he is speaking in penitential tones by acknowledging the universal human need for grace. Verses such as this remind the reader of original sin. They suggest that even prayers of praise might best begin from a penitential posture.          

It is exactly this posture that is suggested in Pembroke's Psalm 104, one of the sunniest psalms in the entire psalter. It includes an exuberant catalog of earthly blessings and acts of providence-the kinds of subjects that are Pembroke's real specialties. Among the simpler items on the list are bread, wine, and oil. Pembroke writes:

Thence Wyne, the counter-poison unto care:
thence Oile, whose juyce unplaites the folded brow:
thence bread, our best, I say not daintiest fare,
propp yet of hartes, which els would weakly bow.

Both Coverdale and Geneva show us faces that are shiny and cheerful, and hearts that are glad and strong. Pembroke, on the other hand, also points to the real human needs that are filled by the goodness of God. Behind the blessings described here lurks the shadow of a person humbled by care, with a folded brow, and a heart that is weakly bowed. This is the portrait of a penitent.

Although this verse-even in Pembroke's version-does not show actual repentance for sins, it echoes her more penitential material in tone. The tension between human weakness and divine strength in this poem is parallel to the tension between truant student and master teacher, or between original sin and divine grace. Again, this is productive tension. Pembroke is not carelessly subverting the joys of bread, wine, and oil; she is simply rooting those joys in real human need. The greater our needs, the greater the grace that fulfills them.

A close study of repentance in the Countess of Pembroke's psalms shows us Pembroke's pervasive sense of original sin and human weakness-but it also shows us more than that. More generally, it shows how thoroughly the countess respects the complexity of the psalms, making the most of each poem's inherent tensions. This quality of Pembroke's work is too easily forgotten if we look only to the positive images she introduces.

An old theater adage instructs actors to "find the comedy in the tragedy, and the tragedy in the comedy." The degree to which Pembroke does this is remarkable given the age in which she was writing. Her brother Philip's "Defence of Poesy," after all, has some tart things to say about the "mongrel tragicomedy." We may be thankful that, in some respects, Mary Sidney Herbert ignored her brother. Mongrel her psalms may be, but it is precisely her willingness to mix modes that makes her poems so thoroughly human.

Works Cited

Bennett, Lyn. Women Writing of Divinest Things: Rhetoric and the Poetry of Pembroke, Wroth and Lanyer . Pittsburgh : Duquesne UP, 2004.

Coverdale, Miles. Biblia the Byble, that is, the holy Scrypture of the Olde and New Testament, faithfully translated in to Englyshe. Southwark?, J. Nycolson, 1535. STC 2063.3.

The Geneva Bible: A facsimile of the 1560 edition. Ed. Lloyd E. Berry . Madison : U of Wisconsin P, 1969.

Hamlin, Hannibal. Psalm Culture and Early Modern English Literature . Cambridge : Cambridge UP, 2004.

Hannay, Margaret P. "'Wisdome the Wordes': Psalm Translation and Elizabethan Women's Spirituality." Religion and Literature 23 (Autumn 1991): 65-82.

Herbert, Mary Sidney, Countess of Pembroke. The Psalmes of David. Ed. Margaret P. Hannay, Noel J. Kinnamon and Michael G. Brennan. The Collected Works of Mary Sidney Herbert, Countess of Pembroke . Vol. 2. Clarendon: Oxford UP, 1998. 2 vols.

Lock, Anne Vaughan. The Collected Works of Anne Vaughan Lock. Ed. Susan M. Felch. Medieval & Renaissance Texts & Studies 185. Tempe : Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 1999.

Appendix: Four versions of Psalm 51:5-6

(emphasis added)

 Sources

Coverdale, Miles. Biblia the Byble, that is, the holy Scrypture of the Olde and New Testament, faithfully translated in to Englyshe. Southwark?, J. Nycolson, 1535. STC 2063.3.

The Geneva Bible: A facsimile of the 1560 edition. Ed. Lloyd E. Berry . Madison: U of Wisconsin P, 1969.

Lock, Anne Vaughan. The Collected Works of Anne Vaughan Lock . Ed. Susan M. Felch. Medieval & Renaissance Texts & Studies 185. Tempe: Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 1999.

Herbert, Mary Sidney, Countess of Pembroke. The Psalmes of David . Ed. Margaret P. Hannay, Noel J. Kinnamon and Michael G. Brennan. The Collected Works of Mary Sidney Herbert, Countess of Pembroke . Vol. 2. Clarendon: Oxford UP, 1998. 2 vols.

Further examples

(emphasis added)

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