Canter Bridge

Poetry and redundancy do not play nicely together.

The linguistic discipline of the poet leads him to use repetition sparingly. It is the mark of a clumsy wordsmith to heap the same syllables upon the word-pile over and over again.

Unless, that is, the poet’s purpose demands this. Then to repeat is to speak one’s art, one’s craft, even one’s truth.

Behold, he who keeps Israel will neither slumber nor sleep  The LORD is your keeper; the LORD is your shade on your right hand. The sun shall not strike you by day, nor the moon by night. The LORD will keep you from all evil; he will keep your life. The LORD will keep your going out and your coming in from this time forth and forevermore. (Psalm 121:4–8 ESV)

The psalmist’s insistence that YHWH is Israel’s keeper, guard, watcher overwhelms the normal canons of restraint. He cannot speak his truth often enough. The process by which the 150 psalms were joined together to become the songbook of ancient Israel weeded out the more rustic attempts at writing enduring, empowering word-songs. Only the strong survived. Only the pick of the poetical litter.

The 121st psalm is no half-baked outlier to this high standard. If its writer repeats himself, it is because he believes—and so did those tasked with editing Israel’s sung life believe—that his truth was large enough to endure this degree of purposeful redundancy.

The poet’s truth is not only for Israel. Having sung that ‘he who keeps Israel will neither slumber nor sleep …’, the next line hurries on to speak to the precarious life of the individual: ‘He is your keeper; he is your shade.’

Perhaps the community, lingering always near the fatal edge of accident and fragility, needs to be told often and insistently, of the divine guard duty that safeguards its future. Our future. Yours, and mine.

YHWH, we might remind ourselves with lavishly unrestrained frequency, will neither slumber nor sleep.