Commenting on the opening verse of Song 2, M. Timothea Elliott writes:

Although the Lover has declared her to be beautiful (1:15) the beloved observes that her beauty is of a rather humble variety. She describes herself in terms of two common field flowers. (Elliott 1998: 898)

Indeed, the Hebrew word traditionally translated as ‘rose’ probably means crocus. For some of us this is a helpful insight. ‘The rose of Sharon and the lily of the valleys’ have become exceptionally resonant and archetypal images, further enriched with other biblical and poetic associations. They can seem to the common reader so grand and beautiful that we are excluded. This union in mystical love cannot be for the likes of us. The sumptuous bouquets in seventeenth-century Vanitas paintings have the same quality of seeming out of reach.

By contrast, David Hockney’s beautiful aquatint etching of Marguerites (a type of daisy) blossoming for a while in a glass of water can restore our sense of the simple inexpensive beauties of the everyday and the commonly available, of what George Herbert called ‘Heaven in ordinarie’ (Herbert 1892: 72).

And yet, as with every still-life, his painting embodies a paradox. The field flowers that might have been overlooked or dismissed without a second glance are preserved forever in the prism of his art. And the subject of Hockney’s etching is not the flowers alone, but the play of light in and through them. The glass itself and the clear water it contains magnify and emphasize that light. And for all Hockney’s lightness of touch, we sense a delicacy in the artist’s gaze, an intimate poignancy in the appreciation of their fleeting beauty.

On the one hand the painting speaks of brevity, like Philip Larkin’s memorable lines in Cut Grass:

Brief is the breath
Mown stalks exhale...

On the other, the care and attention of the painter, like the gaze of the beloved, speaks of permanence and we might think of Shakespeare’s take on the paradox of love: the beloved might be compared to a summer’s day, but with this difference, that whilst ‘rough winds do shake the darling buds of May, and summers lease hath all too short a date’ the beloved’s ‘eternal summer shall not fade’ (Sonnet 18).

References

Elliott, M. Timothea. 1998. ‘Song of Songs’, in The International Bible Commentary: A Catholic and Ecumenical Commentary for the Twenty-First Century, ed. by William Reuben Farmer (Collegeville: The Liturgical Press)

Herbert, George. 1892. ‘Prayer (I)’, in The Poetical Works of George Herbert, revised edn (London: George Bell & Sons)

Larkin, Philip ‘Cut Grass’, available at https://allpoetry.com/Cut-Grass