Chapter iii.--Here the nation is personified as a man (cf. Hos. xi. 1),

who laments his own calamities. In view of i. 12-22, ii. 20-22, this is hardly a serious deviation from the strict form of elegy (_Klagelied_). Budde makes much of "the close external connexion with ch. ii." The truth is that the break is as great as between any two of these poems.