Poetry is more self-consciously structured. Higher level of literary artifice. Major conventions are terseness, parallelism, and imagery. Terseness Hebrew poetry is short and to the point. Cola of poetic passages tend to be equal in length.
Ellipsis intensifies the terseness of the poetic line.
Frequently a noun, but more commonly a verb occurs in the first colon of a line but has no parallel in the second colon. Blessed is the nation whose God is the Lord, the people he chose for his inheritance. Terseness is also characterized by lack of conjunctions and particles. Such a lack introduces an element of intentional ambiguity. Parallelism Semantic Parallelism Parallelism is an extremely important ornamental device, although not all biblical poems contain this feature.