of the Daughter of Sion agasp,
She spreadeth her hands:
"Woe unto me, but it faints,
My life to the butchers!"

On the other hand here is a metre,(62) for the irregularities of which no
remedy is offered by alternative readings in the Versions, but Duhm and
others reduce these only by padding the text with particles and other
terms. Yet these very irregularities have reason; they suit the meaning to
be expressed. Thus while some of the couplets are in the Qinah metre, it
is instructive that the first three lines are _all_ short, because they
are mere ejaculations--that is they belong to the same class of happy
irregularities as we recalled in Shakespeare's blank verse.

Israel a slave!
Or house-born serf!
Why he for a prey?
Against him the young lions roar,
Give forth their voice,
And his land they lay waste
Burning and tenantless.
Is not this being done thee
For thy leaving of Me?

Or take the broken line added to the regular verse on Rachel's mourning,
the sob upon which the wail dies out:--

A voice in Ramah is heard, lamentation
And bitterest weeping,
Rachel beweeping her children
And will not be comforted--
For they are not!(63)

Sometimes, too, a stanza of regular metre is preceded or followed by a
passionate line of appeal, either from Jeremiah himself or from another--I
love to think from himself, added when his Oracles were about to be
repeated to the people in 604-3. Thus in Ch. II. 31 we find the cry,

O generation look at the Word of the Lord!

breaking in before the following regular verse,

Have I been a desert to Israel,
Or land of thick darkness?
Why say my folk, "We are off,
No more to meet Thee."

There is another poem in which the Qinah measure prevails but with
occasional lines longer than is normal--Ch. V. 1-6_a_ (alternatively to end
of 5(64)).

Run through Jerusalem's streets,
Look now and know,
And search her broad places
If a man ye can find,
If there be that doth justice
Aiming at honesty.
[That I may forgive her.]
Though they say, "As God liveth,"
Falsely they swear.
Lord, are thine eyes upon lies(65)
And not on the truth?
Thou hast smitten, they ail not,
Consumed them, they take not correction;
Their faces set harder than rock,
They refuse to return.