uerus, the crisis of the Book of Esther. In the last
stanza is a prayer for future redemption:

Bring nigh the hour which is nor day nor night!
Most High! make known that thine is day, and
thine the night!
Make clear as day the darkness of our night!
As of old at midnight.

This form of versification, with a running refrain, afterwards became
very popular with Jewish poets. Jannai also displays the harsh
alliterations, the learned allusions to Midrash and Talmud, which were
carried to extremes by Kalir.

It is strange that it is impossible to fix with any certainty the date
at which Jannai and Kalir lived. Kalir may belong to the eighth or to
the ninth century. It is equally hard to decide as to his birth-place.
Rival theories hold that he was born in Palestine and in Sardinia. His
name has been derived from Cagliari in Sardinia and from the Latin
_calyrum_, a cake. Honey-cakes were given to Jewish children on their
first introduction to school, and the nickname "Kaliri," or "Boy of the
Cake," may have arisen from his youthful precocity. But all this is mere
guess-work.

It is more certain that the poet was also the singer of his own verses.
His earliest audiences were probably scholars, and this may have tempted
Kalir to indulge in the recondite learning which vitiates his hymns. At
his worst, Kalir is very bad indeed; his style is then a jumble of
words, his meaning obscure and even unintelligible. He uses a maze of
alphabetical acrostics, line by line he wreathes into his compositions
the words of successive Bible texts. Yet even at his worst he is
ingenious and vigorous. Such phrases as "to hawk it as a hawk upon a
sparrow" are at least bold and effective. Ibn Ezra later on lamented
that Kalir had treated the Hebrew language like an unfenced city. But if
the poet too freely admitted strange and ugly words, he added many of
considerable force and beauty. Kalir rightly felt that if Hebrew was to
remain a living tongue, it was absurd to restrict the language to the
vocabulary of the Bible. Hence he invented many new verbs from nouns.

But his inventiveness was less marked than his learning. "With the
permission of God, I will speak in riddles," says Kalir in opening the
prayer for dew. The riddles are mainly clever allusions to the Midrash.
It has been pointed out that these allusions are often tasteless and
obscure. But they are more often beautiful and inspiring. No Hebrew
poet in