This chapter offers the Book of Psalms as the archetype for Herbert’s devotional song. Seventeenth-century psalm culture presents a model for Herbert’s interdisciplinary devotional poetic. In the psalms, and the widespread practice of psalm translation, the voices of poets and musicians engage with each other in collaborative devotional song. The psalms, too, offer a model for the kind of ‘visual music’ explored in Chapter 3, considered here in terms of the musically and spatially aware sequence of psalms known as the ‘Songs of Degrees’ (Psalms 120–34), a feature developed in Mary Sidney’s translation of Psalm 134. The singing of psalms also played an integral role in both public and private acts of devotion. Above all, this chapter sees in psalmody a spiritual enquiry which contests a merely human understanding of time and space to gain perspective on the nature of the divine. In the constructed first-person singular of the psalmist’s ‘I’, Herbert finds his words combining with those of other poets, musicians, and Christians.

This essay surveys the small but compelling body of poetry written by women in Ireland, in English and Irish, in the seventeenth century. The Irish bardic tradition generally excluded women, but exceptions do occur, as when a bardic poem addressed to the teenaged Brighid Nic Gearailt elicits a response from its subject. The bardic poems of Caitlín Dubh are another exception again, memorialising an Irish-speaking Protestant loyalist, the Earl of Thomond. Women did, however, occupy a central role in the caoine/caoineadh traditions (the rituals of verse and oral lament). In the Anglophone tradition, poets such as Mary Sidney Herbert, Anne Southwell, and Katherine Philips explore their marginality from their positions as colonial Protestant writers, while still engaging sympathetically with Ireland as setting and subject matter. The network of connections between writers and readers is often complex, but the picture that emerges comprehensively deepens our understanding of Irish poetry from this period.