When all Doubts in the Way have now been removed, what can remain but a great impatience to achieve at once the near salvation? To this impatience the loosened hearts give voice in vv. 9-11: _Awake, awake, put on strength, Arm of Jehovah; awake as in the days of old, ages far past!_ Not in vain have Israel been called to look back to the rock whence they were hewn and the hole of the pit whence they were digged. Looking back, they see the ancient deliverance manifest: _Art thou not it that hewed Rahab in pieces, that pierced_ the _Dragon! Art thou not it that dried up the sea, waters of the great flood; that did set the hollows of the sea a way for the passage of the redeemed._ Then there breaks forth the March of the Return, which we heard already in the end of ch. xxxv.,[245] and to His people's impatience Jehovah responds in vv. 9-16 in strains similar to those of ch. xl. The last verse of this reply is notable for the enormous extension which it gives to the purpose of Jehovah in endowing Israel as His prophet,--an extension to no less than the renewal of the universe,--_in order to plant the heavens and found the earth_; though the reply emphatically concludes with the restoration of Israel, as if this were the cardinal moment in the universal regeneration,--_and to say to Zion, My people art thou_. The close conjunction, into which this verse brings words already applied to Israel as the Servant and words which describe Israel as Zion, is another of the many proofs we are discovering of the impossibility of breaking up "Second Isaiah" into poems, the respective subjects of which are one or other of these two personifications of the nation.[246] But the desire of the prophet speeds on before the returning exiles to the still prostrate and desolate city. He sees her as she fell, the day the Lord made her drunken with the cup of His wrath. With urgent passion he bids her awake, seeking to rouse her now by the horrid tale of her ruin, and now by his exultation in the vengeance the Lord is preparing for His enemies (li. 17-23). In a second strophe he addresses her in conscious contrast to his taunt-song against Babel. Babel was to sit throneless and stripped of her splendour in the dust; but Zion is to shake off the dust, rise, sit on her throne and assume her majesty. For God hath redeemed His people. He could not tolerate longer _the exulting of their tyrants_, the _blasphemy of His name_ (lii. 1-6). All through these two strophes the strength of the passion, the intolerance of further captivity, the fierceness of the exultation of vengeance, are very remarkable.