A Poetics of Song

Abstract

This essay examines the material dimensions of poetic form by attending to early modern song as an acoustic, embodied, and gendered performance practice. It focuses on the anonymous musical settings of Mary Sidney Herbert's translations of Psalms 51 and 130, preserved in the British Library. These pieces offer a unique opportunity to consider the musical and performance facets of psalm translations that are typically studied from a literary perspective. While a reader would not necessarily have needed musical settings to insert herself into the affective state offered by the flexible “I” of the psalms, Psalms 51 and 130 offer evidence of the vital rhetorical interplay between music and text, particularly when animated in performance, that early moderns saw as integral to the psalm genre. By probing the somatic, sonic, and musical attributes of psalms as song, we might better tune our ears to the “form” of early modern poetic practice.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 6 citations exist upstream.