morose or mired in melancholia. To the contrary, as I have tried to make clear throughout, Lamentations “is a most profoundly life-embracing work,” one whose confrontations with death and suffering, for the most part, stand as “memory’s beginning” to new life. As we have seen, Lamentations’ hope is mostly fragmented and mostly communicated through innuendo and implication in the poems’ lyric play and the like. But here, in these brief stanzas, Lamentations articulates most explicitly its resolve