Lamentations Videos

What this page covers

Where the videos go in Lamentations

The videos here take Lamentations as a whole rather than one passage at a time, so this is the ground they cover: “How Doth the City Sit Solitary”, “His Compassions Fail Not”, “The Gold Has Grown Dim” and “Turn Thou Us Unto Thee”.

How Doth the City Sit Solitary (Lamentations 1–2). Five poems, four of them alphabetical, written by somebody who was there. The city that was full of people sits like a widow, her friends have all turned on her, and the roads to Zion mourn because nobody comes to the feasts any more. The second poem refuses to let God off the hook: he has bent his bow like an enemy. Children faint in the street asking their mothers for bread.

Turn Thou Us Unto Thee (Lamentations 5). The last poem drops the alphabet, as though the form itself has given out. It is a plain complaint in the first person plural: our inheritance has gone to strangers, we pay money for our own water, servants rule over us, the crown is fallen from our head. It asks God to turn them back and renew their days, and then adds a line nobody would invent: unless thou hast utterly rejected us.