VARIETIES OF RHYTHM 187
quite arbitrary textual emendation. Again, in
Canticles i. 4 Sievers finds two strophes each
containing two distiehs 3 : 3 followed by a
two-stress monostich. But at best such cases
seem too rare to point to any strophic system
in Hebrew based on this principle.
There are, however, one or two obvious
features of certain Hebrew poems that have
frequently been admitted to prove the existence
of strophes in Hebrew poetry; and rightly, if
we use the term strophe in no too restricted
sense. The first of these features is the alphabetic
scheme in certain poems. It does not seem to
me a sound criticism of the argument from that
feature to say that the alphabetic scheme cannot
point to a strophic division because in Psalms
cxi., cxii. it marks off single stichoi. All that
follows is that in this instance the units of which
the succession is marked by their initial letters
being the successive letters of the alphabet is
the stichos; and so in Nahum i. and Psalm xxv.
it is the distich. It is 'perfectly possible that,
when the alphabetic sections are more than a
distich long, these sections may have something
more characteristic of them than that they
consist of so many distiehs or lines. And as a
matter of fact in Lamentations i., ii., and iv., and
very conspicuously in ii., the groups of 3:2
(or 2 : 2) distichs form real verse - paragraphs,
for which we may conveniently use the term