192 FORMS OF HEBREW POETRY
it probable that the writer deliberately planned
and carried out this division into equal verse-
paragraphs or strophes.
But if a writer might deliberately distribute
his poem into equal strophes, might he not also
distribute it into unequal strophes? The occur-
rence in some poems of a refrain at unequal
intervals might seem to indicate that he did.
Yet even this is doubtful: the regular recurrence
of equal sections in any considerable poem
cannot easily be attributed to accident; on the
other hand, sections of unequal length are
precisely what would naturally result from a
writer expressing his thought free from any
further restraint beyond that imposed by the
distich: unless, therefore, we can detect some
method in the irregularity, poems in which the
greater sense-divisions, though well marked, con-
sist of a varying number of distichs must be
considered to have been written free from the
restraint of any strophic law; in this case, if
we use the term strophe, it must mean simply
a verse-paragraph of indeterminate length un-
controlled by any formal artistic scheme.
Attempts have from time to time been made,
however, to discover method in the irregularity
of poems divided into unequal paragraphs, and
so to make good the claim that strophe is as
constant as parallelism. Koster, in the year
1831, first offered an elaborate examination of