Examples from the text include: Psalm 72: "I as an Olive tree, Still green shall flourish: God's house the soil shall be My roots to nourish.

Biblical translations were rife in the 16th century as the growth of the Church of England promoted personal relationships with God and understanding of Holy texts.

For example, the adjective "freshly" arguably changes the imagery of this section, from that of a firmly rooted, strong being of nature to a weak and flexible sapling.

Often in biblical literature the "ungodly" simply need educating and saving, making them appear more as "the lost sheep"; whereas "the wicked" suggests a greater intention to do evil.

The King James Bible was not completed until 1611, long after the circulation of the Psalter, so it cannot be said that Sidney softened or made harsher any terms as had not the comparative reference we see here.

Although this is not the implied meaning here, these connotations are significant in view of the frequency with which animal-husbandry and agricultural language appear throughout the Book of Psalms.

David Norton explains how Bray, a Sidney contemporary and a "great spreader of Christian culture", hoped that "literary appreciation (of a sort) would make people more religious.".

Psalm 3 opens with David directly questioning God about such enemies: "LORD, how do they encrease, That hatefull never cease To breed my grievous trouble How many ones there be, That all against poor me Their numbrous strength redouble?

The verb "encrease" accompanied by the connotations of "breed" convey an animal image, suggesting that the traitors are a separate, growing species.

Sidney's are considerably longer than those from the KJV, delving into more literary detail with more frequent use of metaphors, vivid imagery and elaborately poetic language.

Sidney's Psalms offer a more loving, benevolent God attributed more often to the New Testament, with a clear juxtaposition between early readings of the Bible and the 16th-century interpretations of it.

Sidney tends to take one image from the original Psalm and elaborate on it to an extent that one line from the KJV can be conveyed in an entire stanza.

Whilst the KJV is meant as a literal English translation of the word of God, Sidney had more poetic and artistic intentions.

Roland Greene states that "the Psalters deserve a central location in our understanding of what sixteenth-century poets did – for they certainly wrote a prodigious volume of psalmic translations – and of what they thought about what they did.

By the ritual element, I mean the poem's office as directions for a performance: a script compounded of sounds that serve referential or expressive purposes in non-poetic".

This could support the idea of Sidney's Psalter creating a more aesthetic approach in a context for rewriting them in more beautiful wording that is found in the original Hebrew.

By this it seems that Sidney was attempting a more accessible version of the Psalms, removing the perception that biblical teachings must be handled by holy men such as priests or monks, and creating a unified understanding of The Bible that could be interpreted as seen by each individual.

It would therefore seem that Sidney's use of the term "espy" refers to his distrust of the Catholics and the French, while his version of Psalm 23 has more of a political agenda, not one of just faith to Christianity, but to Queen Elizabeth and her court as well.

[28] Another example of Sidney modernising Psalm 23 to reflect the Elizabethan court is his description of Heaven as a "hall", as opposed to a "house" as stated by David.

This can be due to representing such a high order in society that has an aim to protect people, yet the power that comes with it can cause corruption in the person.

This shows the absence of God and emphasizes the speaker's suffering on Earth with his "prevailing foes" whilst he walks "in woes" (Sidney, 2009, p. 83).

The speaker appears to have lost his way somehow and asks God to send him things to guide him again, to what he labels as "thy hill most holy".

The lines and reference to dashing children against stones are in the church approved King James Version of Psalm 137, but the couplet emphasises this a lot more.

There are a lot of double meanings in the psalm and potential dark undertones that Sidney uses, like in the first stanza where "we hardly expect the tears of the exiles to be figured as bounty nourishing the land of Babylon, but perhaps this is to be read bitterly as a form of exploitation.

The repetition of "down" could also be to emphasise how desperate and angry the speakers are, but it could also have been intended to fit into the chosen form Mary Sidney uses of eight syllables for each line.

Fisken says, "What Mary Sidney emphasised were the parallel functions served by the sonnet cycle and the psalms, the resemblances between the anxiety of the lover beseeching his beloved and the anguish of the worshipper pleading with God.

",[36] which implies that the speakers in the psalm are (or Mary Sidney herself, is) likening God to the typical lover seen in sonnets, praising Him and pleading for help to deal with such a situation.

Hamlin notes that this could just be Sidney fitting the words to her chosen form, saying "The use of 'Babel' rather than 'Babylon' in several translations of Psalm 137 may echo the early 'history' of the city in Genesis II, though the disyllabic name may sometimes also just be metrical convenience.".

Norton notes that "complete in sense and form, unadapted to the traditional tunes and unaccompanied by music, the Sidney Psalter could appeal to the religious populace.

And this is only one example of the difference in both texts, because, as Hannay says, "many of [Sidney's] Psalm paraphrases depart so radically in form and style from the biblical originals".