234 FORMS OF HEBREW POETRY
the prevailing rhythm in Lamentations i.-iv.:
these four similar periods are neither four lines of
kinah-like character as Cornill'- describes them,
nor eight lines of alternately three and two
stresses, i.e. strict kinah lines, as Duhm will have
it : they are four periods of the rarer rhythm
4 : 3.2 What Cornill says is worth quoting:
" The metre here assumes a somewhat different
form. The characteristic of the kinah strophe,
the short second member, to be sure remains;
but the whole is weightier and tends more towards
the gigantic: the first members have mostly
four, the second three full stresses." The last
remark is correct so far as it goes, but omits the
very important additional fact that the first
members are equally divided by a strongly
marked caesura: this caesura gives to the entire
period the rhythmical value 2 : 2 : 3 rather than
4 : 3, and an effect which is the very opposite of
the kinah: there is no rhythmical echo, but two
short balanced clauses are rounded off with a
longer clause ; the period swells out to its close
instead of echoing off.
Thus Cornill's remarks seem to me an apt
illustration of the disadvantages and the risk
of confusion involved in working with too re-
stricted a rhythmical nomenclature.
Instead of trying to compress the four periods
1 Das Buch Jeremia, p. 53. Cf. the note in The Century Commentary
(A. S. Peake) on Jeremiah.^2 See above, pp. 171-176.