SOURCE: Eriksen, Roy T. “Typological Form in ‘Gascoignes De Profundis.’” English Studies 66, no. 4 (August 1985): 300-9.

In this essay, Eriksen examines the typological form of “Gascoignes De Profundis,” lauding its innovative qualities.

Gascoigne's translation of the penitential Psalm 130 provides an early and hitherto unnoticed example of an attentiveness to typological shape and pattern that we more readily associate with George Herbert, or in a rather more rudimentary form with the metrical psalms of Sir Philip and Mary Sidney. As Louis L. Martz has observed, ‘Sidney's translation of the Psalms represents … the closest approximation to the poetry of Herbert's Temple that can be found anywhere in the preceding English poetry’, an observation which was qualified somewhat when John Rathmell pointed out that Martz's ‘remark applies equally well to his sister's share in the work’.¹ It is the aim of this article to argue that Gascoigne's employment of a complex eleven-line...