Metrical Psalms

   A rhymed vernacular translation of a psalm sung to music with a regular pattern of beats (meter). Because the poetry of the Hebrew psalms has neither rhyme nor meter, but rather depends on semantic parallelisms between verse pairs, singing complete psalms before the 16th century had traditionally been the province of trained singers, cantors or choirs. When Protestantism insisted on a singing congregation and, in its Reformed and Puritan churches, on the psalms as the only appropriate texts to be sung, the metrical psalms provided, at first, simple tunes and strong memory cues in its meter and a familiar language so that the musically untutored might sing them.

   Versified psalms at first appeared without explicit musical settings. Two of the earliest influential sets are by Clément Marot in France (1532) and Thomas Sternhold in his Certayne Psalmes Drawen into {}Englishe Metre (c. 1549). But Sternhold’s psalms were likely meant to be sung to popular tunes, and Marot’s were similarly set in the three editions of the Genevan Psalter. Both became mainstays of Reformed traditions. Robert Crowley also published a Psalter in 1549 whose homorhythmic harmonizations suggest the English liturgical practice of faburden. Polyphonic versions of the Genevan melodies and Sternhold’s psalms (harmonized by John Day, 1563) soon followed. Eventually the line between metrical psalmody and hymn blurred as the translation of psalms became a rhymed, metrical paraphrase, as in IsaacWatts’ The Psalms of David (1719).

   See also Bay Psalm Book; Calvin, Jean; Lining Out.