The second thing that we lose in reading the Psalms in English is something even more important. It is the heavy tax on the wealth of its meaning, which all poetry must pay when it is imported from one country to another, through the medium of translation.
The most subtle charm of poetry is its suggestiveness; and much of this comes from the magical power which words acquire over memory and imagination, from their associations. This intimate and personal charm must be left behind when a poem passes from one language to another. The accompaniment, the harmony of things remembered and beloved, which the very words of the song once awakened, is silent now. Nothing remains but the naked melody of thought. If this is pure and strong, it will gather new associations; as, indeed, the Psalms have already done in English, so that their familiar expressions have become charged with musical potency. And yet I suppose such phrases as “a tree planted by the rivers of water,” “a fruitful vine in the innermost parts of the house,” “the mountains round about Jerusalem,” can never bring to us the full sense of beauty, the enlargement of heart, that they gave to the ancient Hebrews. But, in spite of this double loss, in the passage from verse to prose and from Hebrew to English, the poetry in the Psalms is so real and vital and imperishable that every reader feels its beauty and power.
It retains one valuable element of poetic form. This is that balancing of the parts of a sentence, one against another, to which Bishop Lowth first gave the familiar name of “parallelism.”[6] The effect of this simple artifice, learned from Nature herself, is singularly pleasant and powerful. It is the rise and fall of the fountain, the ebb and flow of the tide, the tone and overtone of the chiming bell. The two-fold utterance seems to bear the thought onward like the wings of a bird. A German writer compares it very exquisitely to “the heaving and sinking of the troubled heart.”
It is this “parallelism” which gives such a familiar charm to the language of the Psalms. Unconsciously, and without recognizing the nature of the attraction, we grow used to the double cadence, the sound and the echo, and learn to look for its recurrence with delight.
O come let us sing unto the Lord;
Let us make a joyful noise to the rock of our salvation,
Let us come before his presence with thanksgiving;
And make a joyful noise unto him with psalms.
If we should want a plain English name for this method of composition we might call it thought-rhyme. It is easy to find varied illustrations of its beauty and of its power to emphasize large and simple ideas.