David's Crown: Sounding the Psalms

Malcolm Guite reveals the Psalms with fresh clarity. A perfect companion to reading the Psalms

Deep beauty, another heart feast to lead us into intimacy with Papa God’s love

My husband and I have been reading this together: first the BCP version of the psalm, then Malcolm's poem, one a day at breakfast. Thought-provoking and steadying, a great way to start the days.

Malcolm is an elegant and thoughtful wordsmith. These responses open pathways to introspection and create vivid new images for familiar scriptures.

Absolute treasure. I’ve been reading the corresponding sonnets along with the Psalter ever since Malcolm’s book arrived.

The Psalms are a section of the Scriptures that I find myself coming back to regularly between more focused studies of certain Bible books and other time of topical study. Like many Jesus-followers, I found myself coming back to them particularly last year when our lives turned inside out a little. We recognize those passages of comfort, reassurance, joy, praise, anguish, and reflection as we tie the words of David and other Psalmists to our own heart cries. Yet one aspect I’ve never really much thought about is how all of the psalms are interconnected, woven together in the order that they are.As Malcolm Guite, a literary poet and Anglican minister from England, began to dig back into the Psalms last year while thinking about all the ways in which the coronavirus had affected the world, his first response as an act of prayer and meditation was to write a poem of his own to summarize each Psalm. Meanwhile, the very word “corona” got him thinking about a cycle of poems by the famous 1600s poet, John Donne. A cycle of poems in which the last line of a poem becomes the first line of the following poem forms a set literally called a “corona” - or “crown” - cycle of poetry. Guite loves the classic poets & forms of poetry (no modern free-verse for him!); so he decided to structure his Psalms poems in this way - with the intended irony of creating a “corona” during Corona.One of the things I most loved hearing Malcolm Guite talk about (in an online seminar) was what it did for his understanding of the book of Psalms as a whole. He shared about how he began to see the very cycle found in the Bible of Creation—Fall—Redemption showing up in sets of the Psalms, in a way that shows their interconnectedness. You can see this in a set like Psalm 22-24. I loved being able to appreciate the Psalms in this fresh, new way - and also love seeing them now in this connected way, not just as individual, randomly-placed poems.And in the most beautiful way, the very final poem, from Psalm 150, ends with the line that began the very first poem on Psalm 1. It’s a stunning work overall, gives much creativity in which to find beauty, and best of all, points us to the original Creator and Master Author.

Malcolm Guite conceived and wrote this book during the earliest months of the pandemic. There is an irony in this origin, for corona, a word that had eluded most of us until a year ago, can refer to a crown or coronet of poems. These 150 poems are a collection—one poem per psalm. They also combine to form a single poem. A 2,250-line epic which is greater than the sum of its parts. It is a majestic response to the biblical Psalter, the original Davidic corona.The Psalter comprises poems of very different lengths. The longest, Psalm 119, is around 200 times longer that the shortest, Psalm 117. Here in David’s Crown Guite adopts a poetic convention such that each poem is the same length and of the same form. In honour of the canonical crown each of his responses has fifteen lines, a nod to the 150 psalms. He also adopts another convention in following John Donne who linked seven poems, each adopting as its first line the last one of the previous poem. This is more than a clever and arbitrary stylistic whim. This convention celebrates another feature of the Psalter, the pairing of each psalm with its neighbours. The resulting concatenation within the Psalter is achieved in more complex ways than in Guite’s response—it includes various devices such as keywords pairs, repeated phrases, alternating patterns of day and night, matching interests and/or theological progression. As Paula Gooder reminds us in the introduction to David’s Crown, the Psalms also have a narrative that ties and binds them together. This can be seen as a journey of petition down to, and through, the low of Psalm 88, followed by a gentling rising path of praise. This culminates with Psalm 150’s unabandoned doxology.The story within the Psalter is also the narrative of the Davidic kings and God’s kingship. Guite’s response reveals this story with a thoroughgoing Christian reading—this might be David’s Crown but in the 150 episodes we find Christ eclipsing David. This interpretive lens is, of course, that made by the Second Testament and many of the Church Fathers, including most notably Augustine and his interpretive paradigm of the total Christ (totus Christus). As Guite puts it, his work forms ‘a chaplet of praise to garland the head of the one who wore the Corona Spinea, the crown of thorns for us, and who has suffered with us through the corona pandemic [p.xv].’So far, so good, this collection has a form that both echoes the 150 psalms it celebrates and has a coherent and insightful form. Is the execution as good as the conception? In short, the answer is a resounding yes. Each response is a delight in its own right. Doubtless readers will have different favourites. I particularly enjoyed the reflection on Psalm 39 because of its playful allusion to Leonard Cohen’s famous proverb about light and cracks. The response to Psalm 118, despite its brevity before its subject, works with many of the ideas and words found there in a beautiful fresh way. The 125th meditation is poignant, it is a prayer dedicating the collection as a thanksgiving offering. If each poem is a delight, then the whole can only be described as sublime. The single-minded form does not wear thin but rather provides a sort of theological and Christological perpetual motion—one reaches the end only to find that the last line of Psalm 150 provides the opening to the collection.Guite explains that this is a response to the Coverdale version of the Psalms from the Book of Common Prayer. This is evident in the Latin headings to each poem and frequently in the language of the compositions. Nevertheless, is very much a contemporary poetry collection, it just knows how to cherish light from the past. There are allusions, both explicit and implicit, to the likes of John Donne, Julian of Norwich, John Bunyan, William Blake, Gregorio Allegri and Robert Alter. This peppering of imbibers and interpreters reminds us that behind these poems lie not just the ancient Psalms themselves but an age of their inspirational legacy—more profoundly still we perceive the Spirit breathing across some three millennia.If you love the Psalter and enjoy poetry you will cherish David’s Crown.

A wonderful collection of poems to explore the Psalms. Dazzling, beautiful and deepening our views of God and man.

And an amazing tour de force. A great way in to understanding and therefore reading the psalms

For those who love poetry and also love the Psalms, this is the perfect book to dip into each day

An interesting read alongside the psalms in the bible