Suddenly, science had created time and space enough for miracles to occur-the formation of stars and solar systems and the earth itself, the slow and inexorable evolution of life into endless forms, eventually resulting in humans and in this poet, writing these words, that we (an equal result of the ongoing aftershock of that fifteen-billion-year-old explosion) now read. These word-scientists join the chemists and geologists and mathematicians and all the other scientists whose work was exploding open time and space, turning a small earth-centered universe created by God a few thousand years ago into a vast cosmos of tens of billions of galaxies created by an atomic “big bang” fifteen billion years ago. He also includes the linguists who “made a grammar of the old cartouches”-those hieroglyphic carvings on ancient Egyptian memorials that provided the key to unlocking the Egyptian language and giving humans in the nineteenth century access to a culture otherwise lost to time. He thus includes the “lexicographer”-the compiler of dictionaries-as one of the scientists he celebrates for bringing the poet “useful” facts that he can translate from dry truth into searing poetic insight. Today, we are used to the idea of etymologies-of the history of every word we speak, easily available in dictionaries-and to the ways that our words echo back to Greek and Latin and Anglo-Saxon and Sanskrit roots, but for Whitman, etymology was one of the explosive new sciences that was changing the way humans viewed the past, and some of the first dictionaries that contained etymologies were published during his lifetime.
He is aware that when he speaks American English in the mid-nineteenth century, he is actually speaking a wondrous mix of languages.
When iturn 23song series#
But I also noticed that the psalm uses a lot of ‘movement’ imagery (walking, leading, following, etc) that speaks to me of an active response of faith to what the psalm is saying – we are to live each day believing goodness and mercy are following us, that there are still waters and green pastures to be found.As Whitman contemplates the way that Time continues to unfold an ever-renewing present moment, he thinks too of how language itself unfolds through time, from humans’ first imitative utterances through rough proto-Indo-European languages to the endless series of vowel and consonant shifts, meldings, and borrowings that become the ever-changing set of languages we now recognize and speak.
The psalm is familiar to many as a psalm of comfort, in, for example, funeral services. I never set out to write a new musical version of this psalm – it seems very brave, or very arrogant, to think you can improve on the existing hymn version, which has been loved and sung by millions of people for so long! I was actually working on a different song at the time, which after several hours’ hard work was not going well… I happened to flick to this psalm in my Bible while taking a break, a simple melody popped into my head, and the whole thing was written in ten minutes (something I wish as a writer would happen more often to me!).
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