At The Hour Of Closing M/E Words
Understanding the structure of Kinot Poetry
All of the Kinot featured on this site are structured the same: in rhyming strophic paragraphs designed to evoke lyricality. Strophic verses are easily adopted by the tradition of Jewish prayers, which are meant to be sung. Meir, who likely wrote his poetry during the expulsion of Jews from England, therefore structured his verse in a way that it would be easily sung and memorized, as prayers are intended to be. Moses Ibn Ezra also must have known the importance of crafting poetry with the intention of making it easily accessible to voice and memory. Both Rabbinical scholars, the poets were likely influenced by the tradition of Jewish study and prayer which, up until the destruction of the 2nd temple, was passed down orally. In non-written traditions, the ease of memorization and verbal recitation was a necessity.
Refrains – M/E words
“Refrain” describes a repeating word or phrase at the end of each stroph/stanza. In “The Hour of Closing” , the refrain reads as follows: “בִּשְׁעַת הַנְּעִילָה”, “at the hour of closing. Observing the refrain of that poem, I continued to notice that the “לָה” “lah” sound, repeated both in the refrain, and several times throughout the rest of the stroph. Specifically, a repetition of that exact sound, or a rhyming sound, occured in the middle (midpoint) of a verse, and again at its end (endpoint, in the strophe’s preceding lines. In the M/E pages, I present midpoint and endpoint words together isolated from their original poem. I hope to capture a deeper insight into the poem’s meaning by presenting its “core” like this.