Charles Ellicott Commentary Psalms 77:4

"Thou holdest mine eyes watching: I am so troubled that I cannot speak." — Psalms 77:4 (ASV)

Thou holdest mine eyes waking. —Rather, You have closed the guards of my eyes—that is, my eyelids. The Authorised Version mistakes the noun guards, for a participle, and mistranslates it by the active instead of the passive. For the verb hold in the sense of shut, see Nehemiah 7:3, and Job 26:9, where God is described as veiling His throne in cloud, and so shutting it up, as it were, from human access.

I am so troubled. —The verb is used elsewhere of the awestruck state into which the mind is thrown by a mysterious dream (Genesis 41:8; Daniel 2:1; Daniel 2:3), and once (Judges 13:25) of inspiration, such as impelled the judges of old to become the liberators of their country. The parallelism here shows that it is used in the first connection. The poet has been struck dumb (the verb is rendered strike in the Lexicons) by a mysterious dream; he is too overawed to speak.