Behold, O LORD; for I am in distress: my bowels are troubled; mine heart is turned within me; for I have grievously rebelled: abroad the sword bereaveth, at home there is as death. Abroad the sword bereaveth - War is through the country; and at home death; the pestilence and famine rage in the city; calamity in every shape is fallen upon me.
Virgil represents the calamities of Troy under the same image: -
- Nec soli poenas dant sanguine Teucri:
Quondam etiam victis redit in praecordia virtus;
Victoresque cadunt Danai. Crudelis ubique
Luctus, ubique Pavor, et plurima mortis imago.
Aeneid. lib. 2:366.
"Not only Trojans fall; but, in their turn,
The vanquished triumph, and the victors mourn.
Ours take new courage from despair and night;
Confused the fortune is, confused the fight.
All parts resound with tumults, plaints, and fears;
And grisly death in sundry shapes appears."
Dryden.
So Milton -
" - Despair
Tended the sick, busiest from couch to couch;
And over them triumphant Death his dart Shook."
Par. Lost, B. 11:489.
Jeremiah, Jeremiah 9:21, uses the same image: -
Death is come up into our windows:
He hath entered our palaces,
To cut off the infants without,
And the young men in our streets.
So Silius Italicus, II.:548: -
Mors graditur, vasto pandens cava guttura rletu,
Casuroque inhians populo.
"Death stalks along, and opens his hideous
throat to gulp down the people."