Before we perish, once more unto Thy children join Thyself.
A heavenly sign foretells Thy blessing shall descend on us.
Brute force is shattered, and with night all round about,
Thy affianced spouse, loving, yearning,
Calls on Thy faithfulness; she pleads with her eyes, and asks,
is still she Thine,
Is hers Thy love for aye?
The uniformity and monotony of this poetry, it must be admitted,
weary the reader. The author never goes beyond a narrow circle of
ideas, and general ideas at that. It is impossible to make out
whether the allusions are to contemporaneous events, the
persecutions connected with the First Crusade, for instance, or
whether they refer to the ancient, traditional wrongs and
sufferings. Nowhere is Rashi's poetry relieved by a touch of
personal bias. It cannot be denied, however, that the poems
testify to a fund of sincerity and enthusiasm, and that is
noteworthy in a period of literary decadence, when it often
happens that sincerity of sentiment fails by a good deal to find
sincere expression for itself. Esthetic inadequacy should by no
means be taken as synonymous with insincerity. Rashi proves,
that without being an artist one can be swayed by emotion and
sway the emotions of others, particularly when the dominant
feeling is sadness. "The prevailing characteristic of Rashi's
prayers," says Zunz, the first historian of synagogue poetry as
well as the first biographer of Rashi, "is profound sadness; all
of them are filled with bitter plaints.
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