philip sidney had completed 43 of the 150 psalms at the time of his death during a military campaign against the spanish, in the netherlands in 1586. she finished his translation of the psalms, composing psalms 44 through 150 in a dazzling array of verse forms, using the 1560 geneva bible and commentaries by john calvin and theodore beza. hallett smith has called the psalter a "school of english versification" , of one hundred and seventy-one poems (psalm 119 is a gathering of twenty-two separate poems). a copy of the completed psalter was prepared for queen elizabeth i in 1599, in anticipation of a royal visit to wilton, but elizabeth cancelled her planned visit. this work is usually referred to as "the sidney psalms" or "the sidney-pembroke psalter" and is regarded as an important influence on the development of english religious lyric poetry in the late 16th and early 17th century. john donne wrote a poem celebrating the verse psalter and claiming that he could "scarce" call the english church reformed until its psalter had been modelled after the poetic transcriptions of philip sidney and mary herbert.