¹⁴ Cursed be the day wherein I was born: let not the day wherein my mother bare me be blessed.

¹⁰ Woe is me, my mother, that thou hast borne me a man of strife and a man of contention to the whole earth! I have not lent, neither have men lent to me; `yet' every one of them doth curse me.

³ Let the day perish wherein I was born, And the night which said, There is a man-child conceived.

⁴ Let that day be darkness; Let not God from above seek for it, Neither let the light shine upon it.

⁵ Let darkness and the shadow of death claim it for their own; Let a cloud dwell upon it; Let all that maketh black the day terrify it.

⁶ As for that night, let thick darkness seize upon it: Let it not rejoice among the days of the year; Let it not come into the number of the months.

⁷ Lo, let that night be barren; Let no joyful voice come therein.

⁸ Let them curse it that curse the day, Who are ready to rouse up leviathan.

⁹ Let the stars of the twilight thereof be dark: Let it look for light, but have none; Neither let it behold the eyelids of the morning:

¹⁰ Because it shut not up the doors of my `mother's' womb, Nor hid trouble from mine eyes.

¹¹ Why died I not from the womb? Why did I not give up the ghost when my mother bare me?

¹² Why did the knees receive me? Or why the breast, that I should suck?

¹³ For now should I have lain down and been quiet; I should have slept; then had I been at rest,

¹⁴ With kings and counsellors of the earth, Who built up waste places for themselves;

¹⁵ Or with princes that had gold, Who filled their houses with silver:

¹⁶ Or as a hidden untimely birth I had not been, As infants that never saw light.