When he is mine and I am his, what can I want beside?

Grammar, romance and scriptural paraphrase

You don’t see much about Isaac Watts (1674-1748) these days, though he was with Wesley one of the two major English hymn writers of the early eighteenth century. For my money, Watts was a great and modest poet who channeled his very significant lyric gifts almost entirely into a disciplined kind of scriptural paraphrase and versified catechesis designed for easy congregational singing and ready memorization. Indeed, several of his hymns are still sung widely by Protestants today. Some of the best known are probably ‘O God, our help in ages past’ (a paraphrase of Psalm 90); ‘Joy to the World’ (Psalm 98); and ‘When I Survey the Wondrous Cross’ (oddly, a very effective lullaby for babies and small children; make sure you don’t forget the fun baroque fourth stanza, generally excised by the more prudish Protestant hymnals due to an excess of blood).¹

There’s a fascinating story to tell about the evolution of Watt’s own poetics, and the way in which his foundational and apparently so distinctively “Protestant” style arose as much from the fashionable Jesuit Latin poetics of the mid-seventeenth century as from earlier Protestant scriptural and devotional poetry. Today, though I want to think just about the start of his version of Psalm 23:

The Lord my shepherd is,
I shall be well supplied;
Since he is mine and I am his
What can I want beside?

He leads me to the place
Where heavenly pasture grows,
Where living waters gently pass
And full salvation flows.

Psalm 23 has always been particularly popular and I’d guess it’s probably still one of the two psalm texts — along with Psalm 137 (‘By the waters of Babylon’) — that readers who don’t really know the psalms might recognise.

Watts’ versions of the psalms are part of a long tradition of psalm paraphrase and translation that often incorporates commentary and explanation. Here for instance, both the phrases ‘I shall be well supplied’ and ‘What can I want beside?’ relate primarily to a two-word Hebrew phrase in the first verse, which means simply ‘I shall not want’ (want as in lack something, be in need of it). In the second stanza, Watts has only one main verb (He leads me) whereas in the second scriptural verse there are two: the second means lead, the first means something more like make to lie down, and is commonly used of animals — the way you would put cattle or sheep safely in a stable or fold. This links with the imagery of the shepherd, of course, but it also suggests a bit more than just make lie down — it implies security, warmth, that someone is keeping watch, perhaps even a trough of water and a manger of hay. Watts’ ‘well supplied’ hints at this too.

Watts’ choice of translation here incorporates well-informed interpretation, based on what was already a very mature tradition of scriptural commentary based, since the latter part of the sixteenth century, on a widening knowledge of Hebrew among Protestants. By the end of the sixteenth century, the resources available for learning Hebrew and even Aramaic in Western Europe were very well developed indeed (though all in Latin, of course).² Here for instance is an image of the relevant page from the (still!) supremely useful word-by-word commentary on the Hebrew of the psalms by Victor Bythner (c. 1605-c. 1670), a Polish teacher of Hebrew active in England:³

Watts’ lovely second line, “Since he is mine and I am his”, though, is pure interpolation. There’s nothing at all along these lines in the Hebrew original, or indeed in any of the standard early modern translations. Here are the KJV (Authorised Version), Geneva Bible and the Coverdale translation (that is, the ones included in the Book of Common Prayer):

The Lord is my shepherd; I shall not want.
He maketh me to lie down in green pastures: he leadeth me beside the still waters.⁴
(KJV)

The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want.
He maketh me to rest in green pasture, and leadeth me by the still waters.
(Geneva)

The Lord is my shepherd: therefore can I lack nothing.
He shall feed me in a green pasture: and lead me forth beside the waters of comfort.
(Coverdale)

So where does Watts gets “Since he is mine and I am his” from? The simplest answer, I think, is from George Herbert’s (widely sung) paraphrase of this same psalm, the only psalm paraphrase included in The Temple, which has an almost identical line:

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?

But the line is scriptural as well, it’s just that it doesn’t come from the psalm. Herbert (and Watts) have borrowed it from the Song of Songs (also known as Canticles and the Song of Solomon), 2.16: ‘My well-beloved is mine, and I am his: he feedeth among the lilies’.

Song of Songs (detail), Enrico Salfi, ca. 1900-1930. Wikimedia

The Song of Songs is a very beautiful poem, and it became extremely fashionable as a starting-point for a whole range of types of imitation, paraphrase and even political allegory in the seventeenth-century. This fashion, associated particularly with the Latin Polish Jesuit poet Casimir Sarbiewski (whom I’ve written about along with Watts here), swept through Catholic and Protestant writers alike — Sarbiewski’s influence is all over the poetry of Andrew Marvell and indeed the early poetry of Isaac Watts as much as it is apparent in the poetry of Richard Crashaw (who converted to Catholicism) or Abraham Cowley. Herbert’s Temple stands just on the cusp of the most intense phase of that trend for imitating the Song of Songs, and it’s a good example of the ways in which The Temple, for all its greatness and enduring popularity, which makes it seem to stand almost outside time and the vagaries of the literary tradition, was also a very fashionable collection in various ways. You can hear in that single added line, that echo of the Song of Songs inserted into the psalm, an allusive technique of a kind that you would not have found, for instance, in the Sidney Psalter, written just a few decades before in the 1580s.

So Herbert’s hint of the erotics of the Song of Songs is attuned to a coming literary fashion that crossed denominational divides. But it also probably hints at his profound immersion in existing Protestant paraphrase. Two authors of psalm paraphrase were particularly popular in early modern England — George Buchanan, whose Latin psalms are almost ubiquitous even in the smallest of private libraries, and Théodore de Bèze (or Beza), the successor of Calvin at Geneva.⁵ Both collections were printed multiple times in many countries, and there is good evidence that many people owned both: the two were sometimes printed together, and often sold alongside one another so they could be bound together.

Beza’s version of Psalm 23 is strikingly different from either the translations quoted above, or Buchanan’s quite restrained and faithful version. In Beza’s exceptionally tender, lilting Latin we recognise the roots of Herbert’s focus upon God’s love:

Ipse me rerum parens
Ecce pascit sedulus:
Quae me egestas terreat?
Ille me per florei
Laeta prata graminis,
Ille puros lassulum
Ductitat per riuuolos.
Ille languens corculum
Voce mulcet blandula.
(1-9)

See how he himself, the parent of all
Takes care to feed me:
What lack could I fear?
He leads me through the fertile
Meadows of flowering grass,
When I am weary, he always leads me
By the pure streams.
Gentle, he soothes me, his dear heart
With a coaxing voice.

Beza like Herbert emphasises God’s love, that of a parens . . . sedulus (‘attentive parent’), and the speaker — the object of that love — is repeatedly described with unusual diminuitive words (lassulum, corculum) suggestive of a young child.⁶ Ductitat (a frequentative form of duco, so meaning literally ‘lead often’, ‘lead frequently’) is used in Plautus to mean ‘lead home a wife’, i.e. ‘marry’. We can hear here an intimate tone very similar to Herbert’s version.

But perhaps the most striking feature of Beza’s paraphrase is its very unusual metre: technically speaking, this is stichic trochaic dimeter catalectic.⁷ This is a particularly off-putting mouthful of a term for such a tender and simple rhythm — but it’s also completely unclassical. There are no classical examples of this metre used stichically (i.e. as the only type of line in a poem) and even as part of other more complex patterns we find it only once in Horace.⁸ But for Beza it is a sort of signature tune, as he uses it fifteen times in total, all, as here, for psalms of praise and thanksgiving, of which this is the first.⁹

Beza used this unusual and distinctive metre once more after the publication of his psalms: that is, for his paraphrase of the whole of the Song of Songs, published in 1584. Here is the relevant passage of that paraphrase:

Ille totus est meus
Vnicè quem diligo
Sponsus ille mutuò
Vnicè charam sibi
Totus omnem possidet:
Atque odora ductitans
Pascit inter lilia.

He is entirely mine
Whom I love unlike any other
The bridegroom alike
Possesses his dear bride
Unlike any other
He entirely possessing all of me:
And leading me forth
He feeds among the sweet-smelling lilies.

We might notice that as well as the shared metre, a couple of pieces of vocabulary are found in both of these extracts — the common pascit (‘feeds’, ‘causes to eat’, ‘nourishes’) but also, again, that quite unusual ductitans (‘repeatedly leading or drawing’, with as we saw an implication of marriage). The idea that the bridegroom here ‘leads’ the bride among the lilies, which creates a link the the well-known ‘leading’ of Psalm 23, is not in the Biblical text (which says simply, ‘he feedeth among the lilies').

Beza also published a popular set of sermons on the Song of Songs (pub. 1587) and his texts probably helped to establish a particular connection between Psalm 23 and the Song of Songs. But perhaps there is something else going on here too — something about what it is like to learn Hebrew as a speaker of English, and a fluent reader (as both Herbert and Watts were) of Latin and Greek. Let’s look at how English, Latin (from the Vulgate) and the original Hebrew render that phrase. We have eight words in English:

My beloved is mine, and I am his

Latin is generally a good deal more concise than English. The Vulgate imitates the Hebrew by leaving out the copula (the is), but still takes six:

Dilectus meus mihi, et ego illi

Literally, ‘my beloved [is] to me [i.e. mine] and I [am] to him [i.e. his]’

The original Hebrew, though, takes only four:

דּוֹדִ֥י לִי֙ וַאֲנִ֣י ל֔וֹ

This can be transliterated as Dodi li va’ani lo and taken word by word means ‘beloved-of-me for-me and-I for-him’

My first Hebrew teacher used this beautiful little phrase as a mnemonic when he introduced the possessive suffixes that can be attached to prepositions (as here li and lo) as well as nouns (as here in dodi — in both cases the -i suffix tells us that these things belong to me). But he also used the phrase as a way of reminding us of (as he put it) the “sexiness” (we might more pompously say the “erotics”) of Hebrew grammar, a language which includes sex-markers on parts of speech much more often than in Latin, Greek and other familiar Indo-European languages. (Verbal endings in the 2nd and 3rd persons also distinguish between genders, for instance.)

There are surely many reasons for the particular early modern enthusiasm for the Song of Songs — scholars have analysed, for instance, the way aspects of its allegory could easily be adapted for theological and political purposes, as well as devotional ones. (Theology and politics were, in any case, rarely very far apart in this period.) You can’t read material from the seventeenth century for very long before noticing this. But I wonder whether part of the explanation for the vogue is, as it were, grammatical. Any early modern learner of Hebrew already had Latin and Greek, and for anyone with that linguistic background what my first teacher would have called the “sexiness” of Hebrew grammar, its pervasive awareness of gender even in comparison to Latin and Greek (already much more ‘gendered’ than English), is one of the most immediately striking things about this new and different language.

The Song of Songs, probably originally an epithalamium (formal marriage poem), with its highly erotic series of exchanges between a man and a woman, is both a poem about sex, and one of the densest and most vivid examples of this feature of the language. Grammar has its own romance, and unfamiliar grammars most of all. The very rich interpretative tradition of this poem has allowed readers to hear in it many different versions of the erotics of difference — a call and response between the bride and the groom; the soul and the body; the individual and God; Christ and his Church — but also, perhaps, between the Semitic and the Indo-European.

1. You can read the unexpurgated text of ‘When I Survey’ here, complete with dubious Jesuit imagery. There are truly dozens of cheesy American videos of people singing/playing/swaying with their eyes closed to this hymn, but in the UK it is usually sung to a different tune, called Rockingham, as in the link above to the choir of King’s College Cambridge. There’s an enormous list of hymns by Watts here and a more manageable one here.

2. On this see the excellent book by G. Lloyd Jones, The Discovery of Hebrew in Tudor England: A Third Language (Manchester UP, 1983). One the fascinating question of the early modern Hebrew book trade see also Stephen G. Burnett, ‘Christian Hebrew Printing in the Sixteenth Century’, Helmantica: Revista de Filología Clásica y Hebrea 51 (2000), 13-42.

3. This is the first (London, 1650) edition, but there were several, and a very large number of similar texts. I use my edition (from 1676) regularly.

4. In the Geneva and KJV translations, italics indicate words that are not strictly speaking in the Hebrew, but are added for clarity in English.

5. Buchanan’s psalms first published in 1566; first English edition 1580. Beza’s psalms were first published in Geneva in 1580, and almost immediately printed also in England in a pirated edition.

6. lassulus (‘wearied’, dim. of lassus-a-um) is found in classical literature only at Catullus 63.35; corculum (‘little heart’ or ‘dear heart’) is found in classical literature only in comedy, as a term of endearment.

7. I.e. all the lines are in the same metre (stichic); the metre’s basic pattern is long-short (— u) (trochaic; rather than the more common iambic (short-long, u —) or dactylic (long-short-short, — u u); the lines have just two metra each (dimeter); and a final syllable has been removed from each line, giving lines of seven rather than eight syllables (catalectic).

8. Horace Odes 2.18 is written in couplets of alternating stichic trochaic dimeter catalectic and iambic trimeter catalectic. Trochaic verse in general is rare in classical Latin.

9. The others are Psalms 26, 27, 54, 75, 80, 98, 100, 118, 119: Daleth, 121, 125, 134, 139 and 147.