Song of Songs

Apart from the Psalms, there is only one other biblical book that seems wholeheartedly and unequivocally devoted to the art of poetry. Of course, virtually all the minor prophets make their pronouncements in verse, and there are lengthy stretches of verse in far more areas of the Old Testament than there are not. The Book of Proverbs, The Book of Jonah, and Job, for instance, are beautifully rendered long poems that one imagines to have been written with a clear sense of Hebraic Prosody. I think I understood something about the poetic patterns of the bible before I even understood that they represented a certain formal Hebrew poetics. And even now, much of what I know has not come from a careful study of Hebraic prosody. It has come from the habit of reading the scriptures a lot and mining them for the poetic turns that prove to be so enduring in their clarity that I learn so much from them all the time. I have even threatened myself to one day attempt a “translation” of Psalm 119, patterning the extremely demanding acrostic that the psalmist used in the Hebrew. Of course, this is one of a long list of impossible poetic challenges that I have given myself—few, if any, that will ever be attempted much less completed.

For most of the poetic passages that I read in the bible, I am, more often than not, engaged with the theology and the narrative that they explore before I become consumed by the craft of the pieces. A metaphor may strike me as clever, a simile may impress me and distract me slightly, but mostly, the task of the work as a vehicle for conveying some truth seems to dominate my reading—a kind of tyranny of orthodoxy. And when you have sought spiritual comfort and instruction from passages in the bible, it is hard then to simply come to the bible to enjoy the poetry that is there—to find pleasure in the language, the music, the craft of the thing. It takes a self-conscious effort. Giving a lecture or workshop on poetry in the bible has given me rewards like that. I get to talk about the craft and I get to do so because I am trying to convince my audience that there is immense craft at work there. Yet, it is still hard to shake the functionality of the scriptures even if the function is somewhat esoteric. The one exception for me, in terms of passages of scripture or whole books, has been the Song of Songs. For some reason, I have never found an easy path to instructive theology in the Song of Songs, and I have not been able to ignore the sheer intent and purpose of the book that seems to be as much about celebration of temporal beauty and emotion even as it is about the rituals of courtship, seduction and marriage. The book, I remember being told, is a metaphor about the relationship between God and the church. As a young person I remember singing a chorus that apparently was based on the Song of Songs:
You are the rose,
The rose of Sharon to my heart
You give me water
That refreshes me in every part
You are so beautiful
And I love you more than words can say
You are my desire
And my happiness in every way
We would close our eyes tightly, raise our hands, and enter a space of intense prayerfulness in which one’s body and mind and soul seemed capable of making contact with the addressee of this song, namely Jesus. I would never give it a second thought—I love Jesus, and so he can be the subject of a song about love. Yet, looking at the lyric now, it is quite clear that this is a song that is attempting, through its allusion to the Song of Songs, a theological proposition, which is bent on ensuring that the mistake is not made to presume that the book of poetry is at all rooted in erotic love rather than agape love.
The most pressing force in the poem, though, is the almost melodramatic intent of the piece—the intensely exaggerated passions of lovers who are completely consumed by the act of trying to out praise each other. And yet the piece is constantly undercut by the cautionary refrain: “Do not awaken love until it so desires”, and by the lament about the “little foxes” that come to spoil the vineyard. In this sense, the poem is a narrative piece of classic structure. It opens with so many tensions and opportunities for dramatic conflict. In the New International Version, we are aided by the introduction of character names to help us follow the voices. We have the lover, the beloved and the friends, and they are at once caught up with their respective desires. The beloved does not think she is beautiful because she is too dark. The lover will try and rove otherwise, while the chorus of friends will heighten the tension, introduce cautionary thoughts and serve as surrogate spectators all at the same time. It is lovely:
Beloved [a]
2 Let him kiss me with the kisses of his mouth—
for your love is more delightful than wine.
3 Pleasing is the fragrance of your perfumes;
your name is like perfume poured out.
No wonder the maidens love you!
4 Take me away with you—let us hurry!
Let the king bring me into his chambers.
Friends
We rejoice and delight in you [b] ;
we will praise your love more than wine.
Beloved
How right they are to adore you!
5 Dark am I, yet lovely,
O daughters of Jerusalem,
dark like the tents of Kedar,
like the tent curtains of Solomon. [c]
6 Do not stare at me because I am dark,
because I am darkened by the sun.
My mother's sons were angry with me
and made me take care of the vineyards;
my own vineyard I have neglected.
7 Tell me, you whom I love, where you graze your flock
and where you rest your sheep at midday.
Why should I be like a veiled woman
beside the flocks of your friends?
Without the conflict of the chase, the uncertainty about the lovers’ devotion and the dangling temptation of consummation that is being withheld because of the circumstances of courtship, this poem would not have the dynamism that it does. In this work, one has the sense that the act of abstaining leads to the art of indulgence through language, through the expression of desire. And for a boy who wrestled with the conflicted pressures of desire and restraint, it was (and still is, to a large extent) easy for me to see in virtually every line in the poem a grand conceit about sex.
Indeed, a certain feature of the poetic instinct is most clearly enacted here. Here language becomes, at first a substitute for experience—language will be frustratingly inadequate until it becomes an end in itself, but for the time being, the idea of the poem as substitution for experience is powerfully revealed in the piece.
This may have been too easily a cliché and stereotype, but I have always felt that this is exactly the fundamental tension inherent in the poetry of Hopkins—a tension that is shown in the way his poems, though fully pious and theologically circumspect in the raw meaning of the language he uses, are riotous in the forms he employs, the metaphors he draws upon and the wildly (I used that word intentionally) unorthodox manner of his poetics. Hopkins is engaged in an act of transference—his poems are formally romantic and sensual but rarely in content are they such. In many ways, this business of the poet using language and form to substitute (and even conceal) experience is at the heart of the poetic instinct and in Song of Songs this pattern is surely there. I certainly wanted to find it there as a young man and I still find comfort in it. That such a wholly poetic book, so clearly and unequivocally devoted to the celebration of the sensual through verse, sits in the middle of the bible is comfort to a poet who wants to believe that that poetic vocation is not contrary to a spiritual (even when the spiritual is conventional or traditional) existence.
I do return to this book a great deal. I have always found comfort in the opportunity and permission to be devotional abut sensuality and about the wonders of erotic love. The Song of Songs serve as a wonderful purpose in that regard. As a poem of sensuality it is exemplary and instructive. As a poem rooted in the use of metaphor it is a study in how to and how not to do it. As an example of a beautifully shaped narrative poem that employs refrain and counter point to create a dynamic of drama and aural beauty, it is a splendid example. But I have to return to the most critical value for me--that I like it for the permission it gives me to embrace the sensual. How the reggae artists got to that place of seeing no inherent contradiction between the sensual and the spiritual can be traced to many things, not the least of which would be the multiple cultural sources that fed Rastafarianism—from African to India. However, what I do know is that in many of the great reggae songs, this quality is present. It is a similar spirit that I see in the Song of Songs and it is this quality that I am grateful for each time I read it.