"To the choirmaster. A Maskil of the Sons of Korah.
As a deer pants for flowing streams,
so pants my soul for you, O God.
2 My soul thirsts for God,
for the living God.
When shall I come and appear before God?
3 My tears have been my food
day and night,
while they say to me all the day long,
“Where is your God?”
4 These things I remember,
as I pour out my soul:
how I would go with the throng
and lead them in procession to the house of God
with glad shouts and songs of praise,
a multitude keeping festival.
5 Why are you cast down, O my soul,
and why are you in turmoil within me?
Hope in God; for I shall again praise him,
my salvation 6 and my God.
My soul is cast down within me;
therefore I remember you
from the land of Jordan and of Hermon,
from Mount Mizar.
7 Deep calls to deep
at the roar of your waterfalls;
all your breakers and your waves
have gone over me.
8 By day the Lord commands his steadfast love,
and at night his song is with me,
a prayer to the God of my life.
9 I say to God, my rock:
“Why have you forgotten me?
Why do I go mourning
because of the oppression of the enemy?”
10 As with a deadly wound in my bones,
my adversaries taunt me,
while they say to me all the day long,
“Where is your God?”
11 Why are you cast down, O my soul,
and why are you in turmoil within me?
Hope in God; for I shall again praise him,
my salvation and my God."
Psalm 42
The end of the first stanza (5) saw a break in the Psalmist's gloom but at the beginning of the second (6-11) the darkness has once again fallen on his spirit. This does not mean that the momentary gleam of light was unreal, or that no advance was made. It is simply that the procedure of giving oneself a talking-to is a slowish process, and does not work all at once. The old adage, 'If at first you don't succeed, try, try and try again' is relevant here. For although the Psalmist begins once more (6) with the assertion that his soul is cast down, it very soon becomes clear that the situation is not quite the same as before. In the first stanza his distress of spirit made him remember the old days; but here, he remembers God. That is indeed an advance, and if a man can do this in his distress the battle is already more than half won. And so he remembers God, and His love and power in times past, as if to say, 'If God did that once, He can do it again and deliver me. His compassions fail not, He is the same yesterday, today and forever'. But 7 and 8 show that the battle is not yet won: wave upon wave beats upon his assailed spirit but the initiative is now with the good, and a) he recognises that the waves and the billows are in God's hands and control, and b) he has the confidence that God's loving kindness will break through the midnight of the soul. In 9, 10 we see that it is a ding-dong battle, but the ascendancy is becoming clearer, and we feel when we come to 11 that there is a ring of confidence in the Psalmist's words, more so than in 5. As Paul puts it in Romans 5:4, 'Experience worketh hope'!