190 FORMS OF HEBREW POETRY
the help of the ancient versions; I am not for
the moment considering whether the practice of
some modern scholars in making conjectural
deletions from the text so that the refrain shall
always occur at exactly equal intervals is sound
or not.
Some Hebrew poems consist largely or even
entirely of a succession of very loosely connected
lines or distichs; now and again one or two
distiehs may be more closely connected than the
rest, but for the most part we cannot speak of
greater sense-divisions in such poems at all;
and then nothing that can with any degree of
propriety be termed a strophe disengages itself.
But other poems do develop a theme in such a
manner that greater sense-divisions necessarily
result ; in this case it seems to me convenient
in a translation to distinguish the verse-para-
graphs resulting from these greater sense-divisions
by spacing between them: otherwise we fail
to mark externally, though we should do so in
prose, the distinction between paragraph and
paragraph. This, however, is merely a question
of translation, and has nothing to do with any
intention of the writer to give to the expression
of his thought any further artistic form beyond
the distich with its rhythm and parallelism.
But we may fairly detect the intention of the
writer to submit to such further artistic form,
if we find, though his poem contains no refrain