The first stanza (vv. 1, 2) gives in its passionate cry a general picture of the situation, which is entirely different from that of Psalm ix. The two opposite characters, whose relations occupy so much of these early psalms, "the wicked" and "the poor," are, as usual, hunter and hunted, and God is passive, as if far away, and hiding His eyes. The voice of complaining but devout remonstrance is singularly like the voice of arrogant godlessness (vv. 4-11), but the fact which brings false security to the one moves the other to prayer. The boldness and the submissiveness of devotion are both throbbing in that "Why?" and beneath it lies the entreaty to break this apparent apathy. Ver. 2 spreads the facts of the situation before God. "Through the pride of the wicked the afflicted is burned," _i.e._, with anguish, _pride_ being the fierce fire and _burning_ being a vigorous expression for anguish, or possibly for destruction. The ambiguous next clause may either have "the wicked" or "the poor" for its subject. If the former (R. V.), it is a prayer that the retribution which has been already spoken of in Psalm ix. may fall, but the context rather suggests the other construction, carrying on the description of the sufferings of the poor, with an easy change to the plural, since the singular is a collective. This, then, being how things stand, the natural flow of thought would be the continuance of the prayer; but the reference to the enemy sets the psalmist on fire, and he "burns" in another fashion, flaming out into a passionate portraiture of the wicked, which is marked as an interruption to the current of his song by the cessation of the acrostic arrangement.