CRITICISM AND INTERPRETATION 215
then, does Sievers conceive his lines to be sub-
jected? It is difficult to discover any, though
it is obvious that he still prefers that his caesuras
and line-ends should coincide with some sense-
pause if possible, and this apparently is why he
distributes his texts among several metres, though
if we utterly disregard sense-pauses, and allow
ourselves an equal liberty of textual emendation,
most of the lines could be redivided into blocks
of a different number of feet. It appears to me,
therefore, that the analogy of English blank
verse with its freedom from line-bondage is a
bad ground for assuming a similar free epic
or narrative verse in Hebrew: the analogy of
Semitic poetry is against the assumption: and
we seem driven back on to the stopped line and
the distich as the normal basis of Hebrew poetry
of all kinds.
There remains one further consideration: it
is brought forward by Sievers himself, and he
attempts to turn the force of it: the redactors
and interpolators who often, by, their additions,
destroyed the metre of their sources, themselves
wrote in metre; the glosses attributed to them
are for the most part "metrical." "I cannot,"
writes Sievers,' "otherwise account for this
than by the supposition that in a period not yet
accustomed to free prose the tendency to bring
everything that had to be said into verse form
1 Die hebraische Genesis, p, 216.