ELEMENTS OF HEBREW RHYTHM 153
Mf ytbr ryfh | ddb hbwy hkyx
Myvgb ytbr | hnmlxk htyh
sml htyh | tvnydmb ytrw
How cloth she sit solitary, |—the city (once) great in popula-
tion!
She is become like a widow, | she that was great among the
nations:
She that was mistress over provinces, | she hath been (set)
to forced labour.
Budde suspected ryfh, the city, in the first
line on the ground that at present the second
half of the first line contains three stresses,
whereas it should only contain two. Sievers
removes the ground for suspicion by treating
Mf-ytbr, great in population, together as a single
stress. At first this seems, by making ytbr,
great, unstressed, to give a term in the first
line a metrically different character from that;
of corresponding terms, ytbr and ytrw, mistress,
in the second and third lines. But the parallelism
of in the first line with ytbr in the second
and ytrw in the third is, as a matter of fact, not
complete; the real parallel in the first line to
ytbr, great, in the second line and ytrw, mistress,
in the third is not ytbr by itself but Nf ttbr, great
in population, i.e. populous, which, so taken
together, is also an antithetic parallel to the
single-stressed word ddb, solitary, in the first half
of the line; it is only when taken together
that the words Mf ytbr express the idea in the
mind of the writer, viz. the populousness of the