Lamentations
King James Version · 5 chapters · 154 verses · Old Testament
Five poems over a ruined city
Jerusalem has fallen, the temple is burned, and this is what is left: five carefully built poems of grief, four of them alphabetical acrostics, as though the sorrow had to be given a shape or it would have no bottom. The first line sets the tone — how doth the city sit solitary, that was full of people. It does not rush to comfort, and it does not pretend the disaster was undeserved. But at the centre, in the third poem, the writer stops and says that God's mercies are new every morning, and that great is thy faithfulness.