Psalms 42:11

The psalmist is interrogating himself, and the questions are real questions.

Why are you in despair, my soul? Why are you disturbed within me? He is not scolding. He is asking for reasons, in the manner of someone who has noticed a state he cannot immediately account for. That distinction matters, because the instinct in low weeks is either to accept the feeling as a verdict or to attack it. He does neither. He asks it to explain itself.

Then the instruction: hope in God. It is addressed to himself. Nobody else is in the room. Anyone who has had to talk themselves through an evening knows this is not a rhetorical device but an actual technique — a person dividing into the part that is sinking and the part that still has hold of something.

And the ground he gives is future-tense. I shall still praise him. Not I am praising him now, which would be untrue and he does not pretend otherwise. Still — later, at some point past where he is standing.

The refrain appears three times across these two psalms, unchanged. He did not resolve it once. He kept having to say it, and the psalm's honesty is that it records the repetition rather than tidying it into a single victory.