My everything

Robert Alter ( The Song of Songs: The World’s First Great Love Poem (Modern Library Classics) ) notes the variety of imagery in the Song of Songs, which “translates that bodily reality into fresh springs, flowering gardens, highlands over which lithe animals bound, spices and wine, cunningly wrought artifacts, resplendent towers and citadels and gleaming pools.”  He contrasts the use of imagery in the Song with that of “more explicit erotic literature.”  In the latter, “the body in the act of love often seems to display the rest of the world.”  By contrast, in the Song, “the world is constantly embraced in the very process of imagining the body.  The natural landscape, the cycle of the seasons, the beauty of the animal and floral realm, the profusion of goods afforded through trade, the inventive skill of the artisan, the grandeur of cities, are all joyfully affirmed as love is affirmed.”

This is perhaps why we should think of the Song as wisdom literature.  Skill in loving is skill in living because there’s a whole world in the beloved.

That wisdom is divine wisdom.  Alter goes on to note that while the Song “celebrates the body as few other poems, ancient or modern, have done,” yet the Song doesn’t reduce love to slamming bodies or exchanged fluids.  On the contrary, through the sensuality of the bodies of the lovers, a widow is opened to something beyond them:

“though love manifests itself in bodily impulse, it is also conceived here as an abiding force that transcends the body, a force that cannot be bribed, bought, extorted, deflected by public censure, or prompted to exert its power before it is ripe.  In a poem that never mentions God’s name [I disagree – 8:6], love provides access to a kind of divinity, linking the lovers with each other in a union that ultimately recalls the primal unity of infant and maternal breast and at the same time linking them with the teeming bounty and beauty of the whole world.  It is finely appropriate, and perhaps even an indication of architectonic design in this sequence of lyrics, that one of the concluding poetic segments (8:5-7) should be an evocation of the power of love in the larger scheme of human life.”

That point is made more powerfully when we recognize the discrete reference to “Yah” in 8:6, and when we see the Song in the light of the New Testament Canticler, the apostle of love, John.