Jeremiah laments the fall of Jerusalem

Five poems, written in the ruins, and the form they take is as controlled as the content is desolate.

Four of the five are alphabetic acrostics. Each stanza begins with the successive letters of the Hebrew alphabet, twenty-two of them, and the central poem triples that to sixty-six verses in groups of three. Grief that could run on for ever is being forced through the whole alphabet from beginning to end, and then stopped. The fifth poem has twenty-two verses and abandons the acrostic, which several readers have taken as the point at which the structure gives way.

What it describes is a city after a siege. The roads mourn because no one comes to her appointed festivals. Her gates are desolate, her priests groan, her young women grieve. Those killed by the sword are better off than those who die of famine, racked with hunger, wasting away for lack of food. The tongue of the infant sticks to the roof of its mouth for thirst; children beg for bread but no one gives it to them. With their own hands compassionate women have cooked their own children.

None of that is metaphor. It is what an eighteen-month siege produces, and one of its worst sentences had already been written a century earlier during the siege of Samaria.

The theology is not comfortable and is not made comfortable. The disaster is attributed to God directly and repeatedly: the LORD has done what he planned; he has fulfilled his word, which he decreed long ago. He has overthrown you without pity. And alongside that, an insistence that the city brought it on itself, particularly through prophets who prophesied false and worthless visions and did not expose the people's sin to ward off their captivity.

At the centre of the middle poem, in the very middle of the whole book, the register changes for nine verses. Because of the LORD's great love we are not consumed, for his compassions never fail. They are new every morning; great is your faithfulness. That is where a hymn sung in churches every week comes from, and it sits inside a poem about eating children.

The book does not end well and it is important that it does not. The final lines are a question, not a resolution: why do you always forget us? Restore us to yourself, LORD, that we may return; renew our days as of old, unless you have utterly rejected us and are angry with us beyond measure.

The attribution to Jeremiah is traditional rather than internal. The book is anonymous, the Greek translation attaches his name in a heading the Hebrew does not have, and he is known to have composed laments. Some of its perspective sits oddly with his, particularly its complaint that the people looked in vain for help from a nation that could not save them, which is the policy he had spent forty years attacking. The question is open and the attribution is old.

It is read aloud in synagogues every year on the ninth of Av, the traditional anniversary of both destructions of the temple.

The five poems are acrostics, or nearly so. The first, second and fourth run through the twenty-two letters of the Hebrew alphabet in order, one letter per stanza; the third does it three times over, with three lines to each letter; and the fifth has twenty-two lines without the alphabetic pattern.

That structure is doing something. A poem about total collapse is written in the most rigidly ordered form available, and the effect is of grief held inside a frame so that it can be said at all.

The subject matter is unsparing. Streets without people, priests groaning, young women grieving, children fainting in the squares and asking their mothers for bread, women eating their own children, and princes hung up by their hands.

In the middle of the third poem, at the exact centre of the whole collection, comes the reversal: because of the LORD's great love we are not consumed, for his compassions never fail. They are new every morning; great is your faithfulness.