"A Little Incarnation" ~C.S. Lewis

"The Psalms were written by many poets and at many different dates. . . The Psalms are poems, and poems are intended to be sung: not doctrinal treatises, nor even sermons. Those who talk of reading the Bible 'as literature' sometimes mean, I think, reading it without attending to the main thing it is about; like reading Burke with no interest in politics, or reading the Aeneid with no interest in Rome. That seems to me to be nonsense. Most emphatically the Psalms must be read as poems; as lyrics, with all the licenses and all the formalities, the hyperboles... which are proper to lyric poetry.
"Their chief formal characteristic, the most obvious element of pattern, is fortunately one that survives translation. ...'parallelism' the practice of saying the same thing twice in different words... The principle of art has been defined by someone as 'the same in the other.' Thus in a country dance you take three steps... to the right... and then three steps to the left.
Our Lord, soaked in the poetic tradition of His country, delighted to use it. 'Ask, and it will be given to you; seek, and you shall find; knock and it shall be opened to you.' The advice is given in the first phrase, then twice repeated with different images.
We may if we like, see in this an exclusively practical and didactic purpose; by giving to truths this rythmic and incantatory expression, He made them almost impossible to forget.

"It seems to me appropriate, almost inevitable, that when that great Imagination which in the beginning, for Its own delight and for the delight of men and angels... had invented and formed the whole world of Nature, submitted to express Itself in human speech that speech should sometimes be poetry. For poetry too is a little incarnation, giving body to what had been before invisible and inaudible."

~ C.S. Lewis Reflection on the Psalms