Metrical translation of the biblical psalms was an important literary genre in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries; well-known poets such as Thomas Wyatt, Anne Locke, George Gascoigne, Philip and Mary Sidney, Samuel Daniel, George Sandys, and John Milton composed metrical psalters or engaged in versifying individual psalms. By far the most popular psalter, however, was the metrical psalm book with accompanying musical tunes, The Whole Book of Psalms (WBP), referred to colloquially as “Sternhold and Hopkins” after two of its translators. With its origins in the court of Edward VI, it was one of the most popular books of Elizabeth I’s reign, becoming the de facto hymnal for psalm singing in English churches; its influence continued into the seventeenth century. One of the most notable elements of the WBP is its favoring of common meter, alternating tetrameter and trimeter lines, rhyming abab. The only instance in Pulter’s manuscript of common meter is “My Soul, Why Art Thou Full of Trouble” (Poem 40), so it is significant that Pulter borrows so notably from Ps. 43:5 (see also Ps. 42:5, 11) in the poem. The 1623 WBP renders Psalm 43:

The inclusion of Psalms 43 in the WBP has an interesting history: it was not included in Thomas Sternhold’s first collection of psalms, Certayne psalmes (1548/49) but later appeared in his expanded Al Such Psalmes in 1549. Beth Quitslund argues that this later, expanded collection was intended not just for Edward VI and his court, but for a broader audience and that this new audience is reflected in its composition.1 Even then, the version of Psalms 43 was different from that above, ending with the fifth stanza in an altered form. Only in Elizabeth’s reign does the Psalm become expanded, with special emphasis placed on the deliverance of God that the psalmist trusts is coming through a stretching of verse 5 into two stanzas. This short history serves to demonstrate two key features of metrical psalms in the early modern period: 1) various psalms could be adapted and applied to very different political contexts and audiences; 2) verse renditions of psalms could take on highly idiosyncratic characters as poets exercised considerable interpretive range.

Pulter draws upon the Psalms throughout her poetry, but especially in her devotional poetry. Many of Pulter’s devotional poems have a structure that one finds often in the biblical psalms: the speaker first addresses God, complains about her situation, turns back to God, presents her request, and then ends by imagining the songs of praise she will sing when her request is granted.2 See Pulter’s poems The Desire18, Dear God, Turn Not Away Thy Face20, How Long Shall My Dejected Soul24, My Soul’s Sole Desire29, Immense Fount of Truth, Life, Love, Joy, Glory48, My God, I Thee (and Only Thee) Adore50, Must I Thus Ever Inderdicted Be55.

More generally, the Psalms often end on a note of expectant (and sometimes fulfilled) hope. These hopes may relate to present, earthly deliverance:

At other times, they have a more spiritual emphasis:

As in “My Soul, Why Art Thou Full of Trouble” (Poem 40), Pulter also turns to the Psalms as a source of rhetorical strategies, imagery, and biblical maxims. In her poem, Must I Thus Ever Interdicted Be55, she opens the poem with a series of rhetorical questions directed at God—“Have I Thy sacred pledges took in vain, / Or heard Thy blessed word applause to gain, / That Thou dost thus Thine ordinances restrain?” (ll. 4–6)—which assume innocence in the face of ill-treatment. Such a rhetorical move is not uncommon in the Psalms and can also be found in Psalms 43:1 “Iudge mee, O God, and plead my cause against an vngodly nation.” Kenneth Graham (Must I Thus Ever Interdicted Be55, Amplified Edition, Headnote) also notes Psalmic imagery employed in the poem, as Pulter writes, “The wanton sparrow and the chaster dove / Within thy sacred temple freely move,” (ll. 10–11), a clear reverberation of Psalms 84:3: “Yea the sparrowe hath found an house, and the swallow a nest for her selfe, where she may lay her young, euen thine altars, O Lord of hostes, my king and my God.”

References to the transitory nature of earthly existence are also to be found in the Psalms as well as in Old Testament wisdom literature more broadly:

While Pulter may be drawing on these as well as many other elements of the Psalms in her devotional poetry, “My Soul, Why Art Thou Full of Trouble” (Poem 40) provides a particularly good example of one major way that she diverges from the biblical psalmists: she continually asserts her belief not only in the resurrection of the body but also in an afterlife in which she will praise God. The biblical psalmist denies the devotional agency of “dust”: “What profit is there in my blood, when I goe downe to the pit? Shall the dust praise thee? shall it declare thy trueth?” (Psalm 30:9). The dead, according to the psalmist, are silent: “The dead praise not the Lord: neither any that go downe into silence.” (Psalms 115:17). In contrast, Pulter often looks forward to oblivion and disintegration, seeing these states as mere forestages to her promised heavenly existence. For Pulter, she will be “swallow’d” up in nature, only to be birthed anew to “endles Joys” (Poem 40, ll. 39–40). See also The Perfection of Patience and Knowledge39.