Essay Examples on Gillette College

The imprecatory Psalms should be useful in shaping how Christians Pray

The imprecatory Psalms should be useful in shaping how Christians pray today The primary purpose of the Psalms was to worship God through prayers reflections petitions and songs While it may not appear so at first glance the Psalms are poetry Moreover they are poems that are meant to be sung In Reflections on the Psalms C S Lewis emphasized the importance of studying the Psalms as poetry with its unique forms and characteristics He wrote What must be said is that the Psalms are poems and poems intended to be sung not doctrinal treatises nor even sermons Most emphatically the Psalms must be read as poems as lyrics with all the licenses and all the formalities the hyperboles the emotional rather than logical connections which are proper to lyric poetry They must be read as poems if they are to be understood no less than French must be read as French or English as English Otherwise we shall miss what is in them and think we see what is not Unlike prose poetry uses vibrant phrasing to convey more than a simple idea In Sound and Sense An Introduction to Poetry Perrine states that poetry might be defined as a kind of language that says more and says it more intensely than does ordinary language In short poetry not only communicates information but also shares emotion and experience 



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