The Poetic Structure of the Psalms
Recently, a young preacher tasked with preaching his first psalm asked me, “How do I preach the Psalms?” One of the tips I gave was to ask and answer the question, What is the poetry doing? If you fail to understand poetic structures and literary devices, you will preach the Psalms improperly. So, for example, Psalm 46 is structured in three parts, and the author (one of “the Sons of Korah”) provides a cue (Selah is used three times, perhaps as a musical interlude) to his original audience (“the choirmaster”) on how to divide this “song” into three stanzas.
The structure is like the frame of a painting. The poetic devices, however, are the painting itself. Devices such as metaphor, simile, alliteration, apostrophe, assonance, personification, and hyperbole add color and texture to a poem. No matter how artistic the frame might be, it is the painting and not the frame that is the focus. Our job, in preaching poetry or just reading it, is to recognize these images, sense them, and understand them.