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 of the Daughter of Ṣion 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 Qînah 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 Qînah measure prevails but with occasional lines longer than is normal—Ch. V. 1-6_a_ (alternatively to end of 5(64)).