I. "Job opened his mouth and cursed his day." In a kind of wild impossible revision of providence and reopening of questions long settled, he assumes the right of heaping denunciations on the day of his birth. He is so fallen, so distraught, and the end of his existence appears to have come in such profound disaster, the face of God as well as of man frowning on him, that he turns savagely on the only fact left to strike at,--his birth into the world. But the whole strain is imaginative. His revolt is unreason, not impiety either against God or his parents. He does not lose the instinct of a good man, one who keeps in mind the love of father and mother and the intention of the Almighty whom he still reveres. Life is an act of God: he would not have it marred again by infelicity like his own. So the day as an ideal factor in history or cause of existence is given up to chaos. "_That day, there! Darkness be it. Seek it not the High God from above; And no light stream on it. Darkness and the nether gloom reclaim it. Encamp over it the clouds; Scare it blacknesses of the day._" The idea is, Let the day of my birth be got rid of, so that no other come into being on such a day; let God pass from it--then He will not give life on that day. Mingled in this is the old world notion of days having meanings and powers of their own. This day had proved malign, terribly bad. It was already a chaotic day, not fit for a man's birth. Let every natural power of storm and eclipse draw it back to the void. The night too, as part of the day, comes under imprecation. "_That night, there! Darkness seize it, Joy have it none among the days of the year, Nor come into the numbering of months. See! That night, be it barren; No song-voice come to it: Ban it, the cursers of day Skilful to stir up leviathan. Dark be the stars of its twilight, May it long for the light--find none, Nor see the eyelids of dawn._"