Need for allegory

In an 1837 exchange on the interpretation of the Song of Songs in The Congregational Magazine , one James Bennett argued that the Song had to be interpreted allegorically because a literal interpretation made the woman sound immodest: “What writer, with the feelings, or the reason, of a man, would begin a poem on his fair one by describing her as courting him?”  This is not a cultural bias, he insisted: “It would be more abhorrent from the secluded, submissive character of Eastern brides to ask a gentlemen to come and kiss them, than it would be from the dignified confidence of British women.”

This is not cultural but natural: “Though men like to court, they do not like to be courted; and while they think it cruel to be rejected when they could, they without mercy reject her who courts them . . . . No man, therefore, in his senses, would think to compliment his fair one by writing of her, to her, as if she had lost her retiring modest, her female dignity, and degraded herself by doing that for which every man would despise her . . . . Till fishes mount to sing with larks on the shady boughs, and nightingales dive to the ocean’s depths to court the whales, no man, of any age, of any clime, of any rank, can be supposed to write ordinary love-songs in such a style.”