Parker and Herbert

I went to Evensong at Exeter Cathedral yesterday. Wednesday seems to be the childrens' day off, and you just get the adults from the choir, and no organ, so they often sing plainchant and Elizabethan church music. The way they blend their voices into a smooth rich noise is wonderful.  Yesterday for the first time ever I heard one of Tallis's tunes for Archbishop Parker's psalter sung for a whole psalm, and not just for the first phrase. I've often thought it a shame that people don't use them as intended, but I expect that one of the things holding them back is that Parker was not a gifted poet. And indeed at the cathedral yesterday his words had been bumped for George Herbert's translation of the 23rd Psalm.

Poor old Parker. His Psalter book is actually rather wonderful, full of relevant translations, little tables about which Psalms are relevant to which thoughts or emotions, even Augustine's wonderful thing about how music stirs the senses and whether this is good or not, which is pretty honest of Parker as not entirely fitting his case. (I think someone once said that the Reformation was an argument in the mind of St Augustine, and sometimes he seems to be a high-church ritualist and an austere Puritan in the space of a page.) I looked it up to see how Parker translated the 23rd Psalm:

The Lord so good who geveth me food
my shepeheard is and guide.
How can I want or suffer scant
when he defendth my side?

To feede my neede he will me lead
in pastures greene and fat.
He forth brought me in libertie
to waters delicate.

My soule and hart he did convert,
to me he sheweth the path
Of rightwisenes, in holiness
his name such vertue hath.

Yea though I go through death hys wo
his vaale and shadow wyde
I feare no dart, wyth me thou art,
wyth staffe and rod to guide.

Thou shalt prouyde a table wyde
for me agaynst theyr spite:
With oyle my head thou hast bespred
my cup is fully dight.

Thy goodnes yet and mercy great
will kepe me all my dayes
In house to dwell in rest full well
wyth God I hope alwayes.

He's not well served by his rhyme scheme here -- too bouncy. But I'm not so sure George Herbert's is drastically better:

The God of love my shepherd is,
And he that doth me feed:
While he is mine, and I am his,
What can I want or need?

He leads me to the tender grasse,
Where I both feed and rest;
Then to the streams that gently passe:
In both I have the best.

Or if I stray, he doth convert
And bring my minde in frame:
And all this not for my desert,
But for his holy name.

Yea, in deaths shadie black abode
Well may I walk, not fear:
For thou art with me; and thy rod
To guide, thy staff to bear.

Nay, thou dost make me sit and dine,
Ev’n in my enemies sight:
My head with oyl, my cup with wine
Runnes over day and night.

Surely thy sweet and wondrous love
Shall measure all my dayes;
And as it never shall remove,
So neither shall my praise.

"In death's shady black abode" isn't great. Neither is as good as the prose translations, either Coverdale's in the Book of Common Prayer, or the King James Version.

Someone must have noticed that Herbert's translation fitted the meter of the Tallis setting, and put the sixteenth-century tune with the seventeenth-century words. But I would put money on this having been done no earlier than the twentieth century, because of all the settings Tallis wrote at Parker's commission, the chosen tune is the third. This is the one which is given as an example the words "Why fum'th in fight?" a.k.a. Why do the nations furiously rage, but it's most famous as the one that Ralph Vaughan Williams took up and turned into a famously English piece of music, his Fantasia on a theme by Tallis. This isn't the right tune for Psalm 23 -- Parker marked all the Psalms with symbols to show which tunes were appropriate, and to put it simplistically, Psalm 23 is a happy Psalm, and tune 3 is a sad tune. That's why it's so English.

Yesterday was the day when George Herbert is celebrated in the Anglican church. He gets rather fetishised as the ideal vicar, though for myself I find his troubles and doubts more interesting and admirable than his certainties. His poems are often very angry at God. I don't think Matthew Parker gets a day, but he ought to have one, as a tribute to all the church people who have been mauled between the opposing jaws of Anglicanism -- for him it was vestments but I expect Rowan Williams could sympathise.  And for all the people who put good and useful things together using the best resources they have, even if they're not very good poets.