Charles Ellicott Commentary Psalms 32:3

"When I kept silence, my bones wasted away Through my groaning all the day long." — Psalms 32:3 (ASV)

When I kept. —He describes his state of mind before he could bring himself to confess his sin (the rendering of the particle ki by when, compare to Hosea 11:1, is quite correct). Like that knight of story, in whom

“His mood was often like a fiend, and rose
And drove him into wastes and solitudes
For agony, who was yet a living soul,”

this man could not live sleek and smiling in his sin, but was so tortured by “remorseful pain” that his body bore the marks of his mental anguish, which, no doubt, “had marred his face, and marked it before his time.”

My bones waxed old. —For this expression compare to Psalms 6:2.