How are the mighty fallen, &c.!— David's grief, as it began with Jonathan, naturally ends with him. It is well known, that we lament ourselves in the loss of our friends, and David was no way solicitous to conceal this circumstance. "It may be the work of fancy; but to me, I own," says Dr. Delaney, "this conclusion of the ode is the strongest picture of grief that I ever perused; to my ear, every line in it is either swelled with sighs, or broken with sobs."—"In the former part of this lamentation," says Mr.
Green, "David celebrates Jonathan as a brave man; in the latter, he laments him as his friend. And in this he does but discharge the obligation to him when dead, which he owed him while living: for the sacred historian acquaints us (1 Samuel 18:1-5) that Jonathan's friendship for David, however it was cemented afterwards, was first founded on his military merit; that having seen his intrepid behaviour in slaying Goliath, he immediately conceived an affection for him, and solicited his friendship; and from that moment his soul was knit with, or as the word is translated, Genesis 44:30 bound up in the soul of David; that Saul no sooner took David home to his court, but Jonathan made a covenant of mutual friendship with him, that they would each love the other as their own souls; and that, upon the ratification of it, Jonathan made him the military present of his robe and his armour."
"Concerning the measure of this ode,—whoever considers, will find it divided into six distinct parts of complaint and lamentation. These parts I take to be so many stanzas, like the strophe; antistrophe, and epode of Pindar; and if so, then the beginnings of six of the verses are plainly pointed out to us. The first stanza contains 2 Samuel 1:19-20.; the second, 2 Samuel 1:21.; the third, 2 Samuel 1:22.; the fourth, 2 Samuel 1:23.; the fifth, 2 Samuel 1:24 and half the 25th; and the sixth stanza half the 25th, and the 26th, and 27th verses. Every sentence I take to be a verse, because real grief is short and sententious; and to me, many of these verses plainly demonstrate their own beginnings and endings, without the aid either of unnatural elisions, or those mutilations and divisions of words, with which some critics have defaced some of the best odes of Pindar. That noble exclamation, How are the mighty fallen! with which three stanzas are marked, I take to be the simple dictate of sorrow upon every topic of lamentation. It is therefore, I think, to be considered as a kind of burden to the song"