The Promise of Love Redeemed

You may think this still life gives more insight into the book that precedes the Song of Solomon in the canon than into the Song itself. After all, its title, Vanitas, is an allusion to the opening verse of Ecclesiastes and its central theme:

Vanity of vanities, says the Teacher,
   …All is vanity. (Ecclesiastes 1:2)

But the meaning of the Song of Solomon, or Song of Songs, partly arises from its context in the canon. Canticus Canticorum, the Song of Songs, has been read as a response to ‘Vanitas Vanitorum’ vanity of vanities, the central theme of Ecclesiastes (Gregory of Nyssa, Song 1). The mystical experience which both rabbinical and early Church traditions found embedded and symbolized in the love poetry of the Song of Solomon is often preceded by a sense of the emptiness of all our experience in the fleeting, timebound world we entered with the loss of Eden. This is what makes the frail flowers in Song 2, and the way the speaker identifies herself with them, so poignant:

I am a rose of Sharon,
     a lily of the valleys. (Song 2:1)

Adriaen van Utrecht’s still life depicts a bouquet in all its beauty, yet these are cut flowers and we know they must decay. Indeed a rose, already fallen, droops over the edge of the table which it shares with the pearls, the watch, and the coins: symbols of the wealth we must leave behind, the time we inevitably lose, the life that must end.

And yet the extraordinary light in this painting, which illuminates even the skull of mortality, finds its intensest concentration in these flowers, as though eternity were shining through them.

Bouquets in still life paintings were often ‘impossible, because the flowers gathered in them could never all be in bloom at the same moment. In this, such works suggest a resistance to time’s constraints even as they acknowledge decay; they gather together what is temporally distributed; perhaps, even, lift us a little out of time and towards eternity.

Now, over 300 years after the artist saw them, we still gaze on them. In the same way the phrase ‘[u]ntil the day breathes and the shadows flee’ (2:17), at the end of this chapter has for over two millennia spoken to readers of a day when the shadows of time itself will flee away, and the soul will be with the Saviour she loves.

References

Wright, J. Robert. (2014). Proverbs, Ecclesiastes, Song of Solomon, Ancient Christian Commentary on Scripture, Old Testament 9 (Downers Grove: InterVarsity Press)

This painting takes us straight to the heart of the mystical interpretation of the Song of Solomon. The depiction of a hortus conclusus, a garden enclosed, refers to Song 4: ‘A garden enclosed is my sister, my spouse’ (4:12).

And that archetype governs the way the whole book is read by Christians, including the love celebrated in this chapter. The garden is symbolic both of the paradise garden which has been lost, and which salvation restores, and also of the inner garden of the praying soul (Bernard of Clairvaux 1979). This way of reading the text is not confined to the Middle Ages. In her twentieth-century commentary on the Song, M. Timothea Elliott, reflecting on the arc of scriptural narrative, writes in a comparable vein:

[W]ithin this drama of brokenness we find the Song of Songs echoing with the language of Eden and containing the promise of love redeemed. (Elliott 1998: 896)

Mary is typically present in Christian depictions of this mystical garden. This is in part because she is in Christian tradition the second Eve, whose faithful obedience was crucial in the restoration of that paradise which the disobedience of the first Eve lost, so Mary rightly takes her place in paradise regained. It is also because she is herself the type both of the whole Church and of the individual soul in prayer, open to the Spirit and fruitfully bearing Christ into the world.

This painting, though, is unusual. Mary is normally depicted in solitude in the hortus conclusus—sometimes with the Christ Child or angels but otherwise the only human figure, representing the intimacy of the soul-garden tryst with Christ.

Here, however, the garden is shown as a place of communion and community not only with other saints, but with the whole of nature redeemed. There are myriad specific flowers and birds, naturalistically represented, whilst the martyrs St Dorothea, St Barbara, and St Cecilia—joined on the ground by the Christ Child—show the redemption and healing of those who have suffered violence, and St George and St Michael (shown with a figure who is probably St Oswald, the Northumbrian king and martyr) show the triumph of faith over the evil that was the source of that violence.

The rapturous love of this chapter is not the exclusive preserve of the individual soul and her Saviour, but reaches out to include all of humanity and non-human nature.

References

Bernard of Clairvaux. 1979. On the Song of Songs, vol. 3, trans. by Irene M. Edmonds and Kilian Walsh (Kalamazoo: Cistercian Publication)

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)

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 simply the flowers themselves, 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