Endless Love

Comparative commentary by E.S. Kempson

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For many, reading the Song of Songs is both a beautiful and bewildering experience. With no linear progression or discernible plot, one couldn’t call it a love story.

The Song’s swirl of vignettes, love-confessions, and imaginative speeches have a similar effect to the near-abstracted stylized lovers in Gustav Klimt’s The Kiss. The lack of any traceable narrative or details of the lovers’ identities means that instead of portraying the lovers’ characters, the works portray the character of romantic love. As J. Cheryl Exum observes:

just as the harmony of the male and female voices presents, on the poetic plane, their sexual union, so the poetic rhythm of the Song, ever forward then returning, reflects the repetitive pattern of seeking and finding in which the lovers engage, which is the basic pattern of sexual love: longing—satisfaction—renewed longing—and so on. (Exum 2005, 11)

Exum has a gift for illuminating other opaque passages of the Song as well.

When the Song’s imagery is disorienting—many lovers today would never think to compare their beloved to a town or a vineyard—Georgia O’Keefe may help one see: the similarities of landscapes, lilies, and lovers can resonate now as they did millennia ago. If a Hawaiian valley or flower painted by O’Keefe can look erotic to the eye of the (modern) beholder, the Song’s imagery in 8:10 and 8:12 is not such a stretch.

In 8:6–7, however, the poem offers its climactic encapsulation of love—the poem’s heart—clearly and lucidly: ‘Set me as a seal upon your heart … for love is strong as death’ (NRSV). Just as The Kiss became iconic in part by being separated from its context, so too Song 8:6–7 has taken on an emblematic quality in Western culture. Once lifted from its literary and historical context, it can be treated as a timeless expression of transcendent truth: that true love can become central to a person’s very being, in a way that is priceless, indestructible, and everlasting.

The illuminations in the Rothschild Canticles include gold leaf—that expensive radiant metal that never tarnishes—to imply the eternal spiritual value of its lessons in drawing close to God in love. By gilding The Kiss with gold leaf, Klimt not only enhanced the painting’s material and artistic value, but also implied a spiritual profundity to the lovers’ embrace. Analogously, when the poetry of Song of Songs is read as Scripture, its value is transfigured. Canonizing the book as a holy text both grants it spiritual authority and also commends its passages as wise and worthy of pondering, particularly by anyone searching for sacred wisdom to answer life’s existential questions.

And yet, there is no reference to God in the Song, except perhaps 8:6. Some scholars see in that verse an oblique mention of God (‘flame of the LORD’), though others strongly dispute such claims (preferring ‘raging flames’) (Attridge et al. 2006: 911). But this is beside the point, because Jews and Christians have read the Song in a manner similar to that in which many people now view O’Keefe’s paintings: if a landscape can reveal something about womanly beauty, so too may love poetry reveal something about humanity’s search for God. As long as the analogy is in itself illuminating, the poet or artist need not have intended it; those who have eyes that see it or ears that hear may still possess the insight. Ancient Israelites, medieval mystics, and modern scholars have all in turn been mesmerized by a fluctuating sense of bereft distance from God and consoling, bliss-filled closeness to the divine, as found in the Rothschild Canticles.

Though Chapter 8 is the Song’s last chapter, its final verses do not conclude the book so much as start the poem over again.

The man’s request to hear his lover’s voice (v.13) and her reply in which she sends him away and allusively calls him to her at the same time (v.14), take us back to the beginning. Only when the woman seems to send her lover away can the poem begin again with longing and the quest to gratify desire. (Exum 2005: 245)

That the Song has no end underlines its conviction that true love cannot be ended, not even by the finality of death.

 

References

Attridge, Harold W., Wayne A. Meeks, and Jouette M. Bassler (eds.). 2006. The HarperCollins Study Bible: New Revised Standard Version, Including the Apocryphal/Deuterocanonical Books (San Francisco, Calif: HarperSanFrancisco)

Exum, J. Cheryl. 2005. Song of Songs: A Commentary (Louisville: Presbyterian Publishing)

See full exhibition for Song of Solomon 8

Song of Solomon 8

Revised Standard Version

8O that you were like a brother to me,

that nursed at my mother’s breast!

If I met you outside, I would kiss you,

and none would despise me.

2I would lead you and bring you

into the house of my mother,

and into the chamber of her that conceived me.

I would give you spiced wine to drink,

the juice of my pomegranates.

3O that his left hand were under my head,

and that his right hand embraced me!

4I adjure you, O daughters of Jerusalem,

that you stir not up nor awaken love

until it please.

5Who is that coming up from the wilderness,

leaning upon her beloved?

Under the apple tree I awakened you.

There your mother was in travail with you,

there she who bore you was in travail.

6Set me as a seal upon your heart,

as a seal upon your arm;

for love is strong as death,

jealousy is cruel as the grave.

Its flashes are flashes of fire,

a most vehement flame.

7Many waters cannot quench love,

neither can floods drown it.

If a man offered for love

all the wealth of his house,

it would be utterly scorned.

8We have a little sister,

and she has no breasts.

What shall we do for our sister,

on the day when she is spoken for?

9If she is a wall,

we will build upon her a battlement of silver;

but if she is a door,

we will enclose her with boards of cedar.

10I was a wall,

and my breasts were like towers;

then I was in his eyes

as one who brings peace.

11Solomon had a vineyard at Baʹal-haʹmon;

he let out the vineyard to keepers;

each one was to bring for its fruit a thousand pieces of silver.

12My vineyard, my very own, is for myself;

you, O Solomon, may have the thousand,

and the keepers of the fruit two hundred.

13O you who dwell in the gardens,

my companions are listening for your voice;

let me hear it.

14Make haste, my beloved,

and be like a gazelle

or a young stag

upon the mountains of spices.

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