s, may
occasionally enhance the music and sharpen the edge of an Oracle yet
oftener dulls the melody and weakens the emphasis.(54) The figures again
are always simple and homely, but sometimes even ugly, as is not
infrequent in the rural poetries of all peoples. Even the dung on the
pastures and the tempers of breeding animals are as readily used as are
the cleaner details of domestic life and of farming--the house-candle, the
house-mill, the wine skins, the ornaments of women, the yoke, the plough,
and so forth. And there are abrupt changes of metaphor as in our early
ballads, due to the rush of a quick imagination and the crowd of concrete
figures it catches.

Some of Jeremiah's verse indeed shows no irregularity. The following, for
instance, which recalls as Hosea loved to do the innocence and loyalty of
Israel's desert days, is in the normal Qinah rhythm of lines with
alternately _three_ and _two_ accents each. The two first lines are
rhymed, the rest not.

II. 2f.:--

The troth of thy youth I remember,
Thy love as a bride,
Thy follow of Me through the desert,
The land unsown.
Holy to the Lord was Israel,
Of His income the firstling,
All that would eat it stood guilty,
Evil came on them.

Or II. 32:--

Can a maiden forget her adorning,
Or her girdle the bride?
Yet Me have My people forgotten,
Days without number.
How fine hast thou fashioned thy ways,
To seek after love!
Thus 't was thyself(55) to [those] evils
Didst train(56) thy ways.
Yea on thy skirts is found blood
Of innocent(57) souls.
Not only on felons(?) I find it,(58)
But over all these.

Here again is a passage which, with slight emendations and these not
arbitrary, yields a fair constancy of metre (IV. 29-31):--

From the noise of the horse and the bowmen
All the land is in flight,
They are into the caves, huddle in thickets,
And are up on the crags.(59)
Every town of its folk is forsaken,
With none to inhabit.
All is up! Thou destined to ruin,(?)(60)
What doest thou now
That thou deck'st thee in deckings of gold
And clothest in scarlet,(61)
And with stibium widenest thine eyes?
In vain dost thou prink!
Though satyrs, they utterly loathe thee,
Thy life are they after.
For voice as of travail I hear,
Anguish as hers that beareth,
The voice