VARIETIES OF RHYTHM 193
the Hebrew strophe;^1 he reached the conclusion
that parallelism of verses is as regular as parallel-
ism of lines, and consequently that all Hebrew
poetry is more or less strophic in nature. The
6G more or less " is an important saving clause;
but a still more important one follows, and this
secures Koster's accuracy of observation at the
expense of his theory ; he claims that no one
can point to any poetical passage of the Old
Testament which does not, within the same degree
of license that is permitted in parallelism within
the distich, follow to some extent a symmetrical
plan. But since Koster has previously admitted
that the parallelism between verse-groups is
generally synthetic, and since, as I have main-
tained, synthetic parallelism is really not parallel-
ism, all that Koster succeeds in maintaining is
that in every Hebrew poem there is between
verse-groups a parallelism that is generally of the
type that is, strictly speaking, not parallelism at
all. And this is only a roundabout way of saying
that in Hebrew poems there are greater sense-
divisions than those of the successive single
distichs; and this, as I have suggested above,
though scarcely true of all, is true of very many
Hebrew poems.
One other point in Koster's discussion may be
briefly indicated : in some of his specimens he
1 "Die Strophen, oder der Parallelismus der Verse der hebraischen
Poesie untersucht " in Theologische Studien and Kritiken, Vol. iv.