We come now to psalm 96, a glorious poem of pure praise which contains the beautiful line
O worship the Lord in the beauty of holiness: let the whole earth stand in awe of him.
The psalm goes on to invoke the whole creation to join in the psalmist’s hymn of praise:
Let the heavens rejoice, and let the earth be glad: let the sea make a noise, and all that therein is.
Let the field be joyful, and all that is in it: then shall all the trees of the wood rejoice before the Lord.
In my own poetic response I have also delighted in nature and striven to get something of the music and beauty the psalmist invokes into the very sound of my words, because, as i say in the poem, it is one of our vocations as human beings, to voice creation’s praise.
Frustratingly, the new WordPress software seems to strip out the breaks between the three line stanzas every time I put them back in. If you have the book you will see that the poem is intended to be laid out in five three-line stanzas, not a single block of 15 lines, but there seems no way of restoring this arrangement! Clearly WordPress is not intended for poets!
As always you can hear me read the poems by clicking on the play button or the title and you can find the other poems in this evolving series by putting the word ‘psalm’ into the search box on the right.
The full set of these poems has now been published as a book David’s Crown which you can buy from UK Amazon Here, or, in North America, it is available from Amazon Here.
Our Saviour King and Shepherd calls us home
And on our homeward journey bids us sing,
To join that all-renewing song to him
Which all creation sings. The valleys ring
With praises and the mountaintops rejoice;
The greenwood trees and meadow flowers bring
Their silent praise and call on us to voice
It for them in our songs, to worship him
In awe, in beauty, and in holiness.
It is not for ourselves alone we hymn
The great creator, for we lift our song
To voice creation’s praise. The drowsy hum
Of honey laden bees, the lovely, long
And lapsing sigh of waves along the shore,
And our own joy, must all make up the song.
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Malcolm Guite 
As always I love your poetry, and this one takes me into nature and praise while I am sitting in my office. A tip for WordPress (and I am not an expert by any means!): Click on the “verse” icon that looks like a little leaf when importing a poem to retain the spacing you want. It took me a long time to learn this. I hope it helps.
yes, lovely sounds around the ‘bees’ and ‘waves’, very nice! Reminding of course of Yeats’ ‘bee-loud glade’…