To Mary Sidney, On Reading Her Psalms

You give me a little courage, Mary, in your skittish dedication to her highness; I too can dare as humbleness may dare; if there’s anywhere to speak with you, it’s here at the wordy Anglo-Saxon periphery of the universe’s one great surge of praise though I’m lost here. Where’s the joyful noise? the syllables I managed to memorize before they were weighted down by meaning? and what’s all this complicated rhyme? Don’t mistake me—I’m not complaining; it’s just not my notion of a psalm for all my love of wrought, elaborate things— especially when they’re the sort that sings and yours do sing a stunning song— but they’re off-kilter without the awe inherent in my ancient holy tongue. I miss my amen sela, hallelujah though I do applaud you and your brother— going for the full linguistic bait-and-switch in the move from one language to another: David’s disarmingly direct speech a tour-de-force of formal contrivance (no form repeated more than once in each of a hundred fifty psalms!) in your show-off/virtuoso hands. Talk about such a song in such a land— but what else is there in dreary England? Its sole extravagance a trove of synonyms that endlessly perplexes and expands its mongrel, unbeautiful tongue— a language, frankly, crying out for poetry given its absence, even, of integrity not to mention intrinsic song. . . . (Its sound: water going down the drain according to my friend, an Italian, after riding in a compartment of Americans gurgling all the way from Florence to Rome.) Why not a convoluted scheme of intricately wrought meter and rhyme? So what if the Hebrew has no strict patterns? Aim for a parallel sublime; aren’t poems for the impossible? Though perhaps yours wouldn’t have been written had you known how daunting their task was; you had no Hebrew, used the Coverdale, Wyatt, Geneva Bible, as cribs for Latin, even psaumes de David, mis en rime Françoise . . . Clearly, your secret weapon was ignorance, also useful (look at me!) in writing a poem, your psalms fourth- and fifth-hand half the time. Unless (of course!) your stroke of brilliance was to focus on the one thing you could do: Sing and let your song be new which they are, profoundly, even to me, who know so many bits of the originals of what you claim you’re “translating” by heart. Still, I’ll be reading along, alternately put off and spellbound by your art- ifice, when my wary eye suddenly falls on something both completely known and new, my own—our own—ungainly language for a brief instant alien with grace, a black-on-white typescript mirage in which English letters turn into Hebrew or at least intercept its holiness. . . . How did you manage it, Mary? Your contemporaries called it piety— but I don’t believe that for a second. What motivated you was love of poetry, or rather of your legendary brother—lost so young—whom you would spend your whole life working to immortalize. . . . I’m not sure he needed you. No lighter touch exists in English poetry than his . . . a touch you often managed to approach in your grief-induced lyric resolve to force a bit of him to stay alive. Poetry as solace, as wizardry— and there he is, with you, all the time, clearly palpable in all your artistry. It was your eagerness to be with him that kept you going back to intervene with yet one more indomitable line, got you through all hundred-fifty psalms. Or maybe it was just your poet’s ruse (poetry often thrives on self-delusion) to trick yourself to rise to his occasion. . . . Unless he just provided the excuse to stake your own (quite vast) poetic claims, impossible to say from this vantage point: to distinguish collaborator from muse, self-doubt from false humility but, then again, there’s a poetry in mystery. Who will contradict me if I confuse my own passions with yours—so convenient, inevitable?—in a poem like this— though you and I—despite the labyrinth of misapprehension, class, religion reinforcing our dissociation (Jew from Christian, commoner from countess, twenty-first-century from seventeenth) come together in passion upon passion (forgive me, Mary, if dare too far): psalms, poetic forms, your genius brother (I mean both the poet and the man; no poem could manufacture that much charm). We’ve even suffered from a kindred harm: my version, albeit, fairly mild, though I too was admonished as a child about what a woman dared not do. Still, I have a vast cohort, while you were almost entirely alone. Better yet, I had the complete Dickinson (published just a year before I was born); I didn’t know it yet, but I had you . . . while you had to ransack antiquity for even fragments of poems by a woman. But of course you weren’t troubled by inequity— it was, frankly, all you knew— you might even have relished your position as sole woman poet, thinker, patron— lonely as it was—though you did encourage your precocious niece, Mary (later Wroth). And who can really estimate the damage of your appalling bargain: a brother’s death required to turn you into poet? Of course, in your time, death was everywhere. Perhaps you were pious—a last resort to shore up an attenuated heart against even further disrepair, immersion in the psalms a sort of antidote to life’s massive overdose of pain: from living with a sad, disfigured mother (small-pox scars from nursing a sick queen) mourning her husband’s lost affection to deaths of favorites—your sister, your brother, your only daughters, Katherine, then Anne. God made this day; he did us send it In joy and mirth then let us spend it Excellent advice, if it would hold— And maybe it does, when you can summon all that air or life enfold to distract you with a binge of exaltation . . . or if that fails, then an assiduous extravaganza of sublime detail calibrated to provide the wherewithal to face a universe we cannot alter if not with joy and mirth, at least with grace: a perfect, hand-illuminated psalter, the loops of all its letters filled with gold— a treasure, even, for an exacting Queen— offering a deity who’ll listen to a voice alternately humble, bold, beseeching, thankful, ecstatic, bleak, through which (hallelujah, Mary!) you still speak.