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America’s First Book

© Linda Sue Grimes

The Bay Psalm Book was the first book to be published in the Thirteen Colonies. Interestingly, the first printing press was specifically purchased and imported from England for the purpose of printing this book in the Colonies. That makes this publication a very important part of American poetic history.

Another astounding fact is that it was published a mere twenty years after the first colonists arrived on the Mayflower at Plymouth Rock in 1620. Since its publication in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in 1640, The Bay Psalm Book has been utilized widely, not only in the Colonies but also in England and Scotland.

A committee of approximately thirty clergymen, including Richard Mather, John Eliot, and Thomas Weld, refashioned the psalms into crude verse forms, and the Preface was written possibly by Richard Mather; although some history scholars attribute it to John Cotton. The first edition did not contain musical annotations; those were later added in the ninth edition in 1968. The book has never been out of print, and although there were only seventeen copies of the first edition printed, it is still available. (I just ordered a copy from Amazon.)

As previously mentioned, The Bay Psalm Book has gone through several editions and has continued to be used since it publication in 1640. The second edition appeared in 1647, and the third edition put out in 1651 was revised heavily by Henry Dunster and Richard Lyon. The ninth edition appearing in 1698 was the first to contain music, featuring the musical notation from John Playford's A Brief Introduction to the Skill of Musik which had been first brought out in London in 1654.

Here is a brief sample of the verse that the clergymen made of Psalm 23, taken from Three Centuries of American Poetry by Allen Mandelbaum and Robert D. Richardson, Jr.:

The Lord to mee a shepheard is,
want therefore shall not I.
Hee in the folds of tender-grasse,
doth cause mee downe to lie:
To waters calme me gently leads
Restore my soule doth hee:
he doth in paths of righteousnes:
for his names sake leade mee.

The awkwardness is readily apparent, but as Mather (or Cotton) stated in the Preface, the purpose of the refashioned verse is not to arrive at elegant poetry but to make songs out of the psalms, which obviously meant to the clergymen that an abundance of rime was required.

Some of the language may seem odd to the modern reader's ear and eye, but we have to remember that the spelling used in early America differs somewhat from our spelling today: for example, the addition of an extra "-e" at the end of some words, such as "hee," "grasse," "leade," and mee." And quite obviously the word order chosen by the clergymen served to create the rime schemes. No doubt they believed that the rime would facilitate their parishioners in remembering the psalms.

The copyright of the article America’s First Book in American Poetry is owned by Linda Sue Grimes. Permission to republish America’s First Book in print or online must be granted by the author in writing.