[In the following essay, revised from an original 1982 publication, Falk addresses issues of setting, theme, and motif in the Song of Songs that have arisen from her translation of the work. She finds the Song "extraordinarily rich with sensual imagery."]

Woven into the tapestry of the Song are recurrent patterns that suggest the presence of literary conventions, analogous in some ways to the Petrarchan conventions of Renaissance poetry. To uncover and illuminate recurrent material in the Song may draw us closer to the distant cultural source of this poetry, while also deepening our appreciation of the individual poems and of the collection as a whole. The following discussions are intended to reveal patterns in the text by illuminating settings and ambiance (which I call "contexts"), underlying premises and ideas ("themes"), and repeated images and symbols ("motifs"). These categories were not fixed in my mind prior to translating; rather, they emerged during the process and, especially, aftersards, when I was able to step back from the text once again and see its contours from a new vantage point.

FOUR BASIC CONTEXTS

Context as setting is not equally dominant in all the poems of the Song; some poems depend crucially on setting for their arguments or moods, while others seem not to "take place" anywhere in particular, but to focus more on internal (psychological) space. Yet even when the setting of a poem is undefined, ambiance or atmosphere is present to some degree. Context changes often in the Song, from poem to poem and sometimes within poems, creating kaleidoscopic shifts of patterns. Out of this movement we can isolate four basic contexts that, either separately or in combination, color most of the poems in the Song:

1. the cultivated or habitable countryside;
2. the wild or remote natural landscape and its elements;
3. interior environments (houses, halls, rooms);
4. city streets.

1. All the love dialogues and many of the love monologues take place, at least in part, in the countryside. The pastures of poem 3, the grove of poem 6, the valley and thicket of poem 7, the blossoming spring landscapes of poems 9, 21, and 24, the rocks and ravines of poem 10, the hills of poems 12, 15, and 31, the gardens of poems 18, 19, and 31, and the shade of the quince tree in poem 27 are all tempting and conducive sites for love. Either of the lovers may take the initiative in these settings, which themselves seem to invite lovemaking. The poems which share these lush pastoral contexts tend to portray young, idealized love: the pleasure of anticipation finds at least as much expression here as does the experience of fulfillment. Although the lovers are often separated in the countryside, reunions are expected. Thus, in the benign and receptive rural landscape, invitations to love are playful, suffused with feelings of happy arousal.

   The countryside also sets the scene, as background if not foreground, for other types of poems—2, 11, and 30—that are not love monologues or dialogues. In each of these, the country is represented by the vineyard, a special kind of place (discussed below as a separate motif).… [T]he tone of these poems is quite different from that of the love monologues just mentioned.

2. Although nature is generally receptive to the human lovers of the Song, another kind of natural context lends a very different ambiance to several poems. This is the landscape of wild, remote, sometimes dangerous nature: the desert/wilderness of poems 14 and 26, the mountain lairs of poem 16, the seas and rivers of poem 28, and the staring eye of the heavens in poems 2 and 20. These elements of nature suggest distant or overwhelming forces, which evoke anxiety or a sense of urgency, as in poems 16 and 28, or create a miragelike atmosphere, as in poems 14 and 26, or suggest mystery, as in poems 2 and 20. Although these natural elements are sometimes central images rather than complete settings, their effect in the poems is always strong; the poems that share this ambiance have a different mood from others in the collection, a mood permeated by awe. In contrast to the countryside setting, this context does not support intimacy; here nature can keep the lovers apart or be a fearsome backdrop to their union. The expression of love is not playful but reverent, sometimes even overwhelmed. Not just I-Thou love is expressed in this context, but a variety of emotional experiences, balancing the more predictable range found in the countryside.
3. Interior environments take several forms in the Song—the king's chambers in poems 1 and 5, the winehall in poem 8, the speaker's bedroom in poems 13 and 19, and the mother's house in poems 13 and 25—are all associated with lovemaking. In addition, poem 9 opens with a woman inside her house, listening for the voice of her lover, and poem 24 closes with an anticipated return from the countryside to the doorways of the lovers' home, where, the speaker promises, lovemaking will reach its climax. The interior environment often encourages the modes of dreams and fantasies, and the imagination seems to have its freest reign here.

   Associated twice with the interior context of the home is the mother. The mother's house is the most intimate and protected environment in the Song; for this reason, the speakers of poems 13 and 25 want to lead their beloveds out of the streets and back to this private place, where they will be completely free to express their love.

   The supportive bond of love between mother and child, which is implied in these poems (and in others not set in this context: 14, 20, 27), is in sharp contrast to some of the sibling relationships portrayed in the Song. In poem 2, for example, the "mother's sons" seem to have punished their sister for being sexually active; agian in 29, the brothers want to protect their sister from, or punish her for, having erotic experience.… Siblings, however, are not always portrayed as hostile; in poem 25 the speaker says that if her lover were her brother, she would fel free to kiss him in the public streets, which implies that sibling affection, besides being considered natural, is assumed by the speaker to be socially acceptable. And of course, the metaphorical phrase "my sister, my bride" (poems 17 and 18) also suggests that affection was an inherent aspect of sibling relationships.…

   Strikingly, no mention of a father—or of the father's home—appears anywhere in the Song. Rather, male figures (with the exception of male lovers, and "the king" when used as a metaphor for the lover) play more distant roles, making their appearances in more public places. Public society, as we shall see next, creates a sharply different context from the microcosm of the home.

4. Of all the contexts of the Song, the public domain of the city is the one least sympathetic to the lovers. Thus, the city watchmen or guards are of no help to the woman searching for her beloved in poem 13; in poem 19 these same figures violate the female lover. The speaker of poem 25 senses the city's danger: she knows she cannot kiss her beloved in the streets without exposing herself to ridicule. The city women (literally, "daughters of Jerusalem" or "daughters of Zion") are another group of spectators whose attitude toward the lovers is less than sympathetic: in poems 8, 13, and 25 they must be adjured not to disturb the lovemaking; in poem 19 they offer to help the woman find her beloved only after she entices them with a description of his charms. In poem 2, the city women are the hostile audience of a rural woman whose dark beauty they scorn. (In poem 14, the only other poem in which the daughters of Jerusalem appear, they play a different role. This poem is set in the desert rather than the city, and the women here are associated not with the public streets but with the entourage of the king. I have therefore distinguished them in this context by referring to them, in a more literal translation, as "Jerusalem's daughters.") Like the city guards, the city women provide a foil against which the intimate world-of-two emerges as an ideal; their presence contributes to the conflict and tension that often emerge in poems having urban settings. (I shall explore these ideas further in the ensuing discussions of themes).

   Related to the subject of contexts are proper place-names, which appear frequently in the Hebrew text. In Hebrew these names often have considerable resonance, but in translation they lose a great deal. The places named in the Hebrew include: Jerusalem/Zion, Ein Gedi, Lebanon, Mount Gilead, Amana, Senir, Hermon, Tirza, Heshbon, Bat-Rabbim, Damascus, Carmel, and Baal-Hamon. I retained specific names in the translations when I thought they had clear associations for a contemporary English reader, or when I felt that specificity added to, rather than detracted from, the point of the poem. For example, in poem 20 I chose to use the names "Tirza" and "Jerusalem" instead of referring generally to "cities," because the musicality of the one, alongside the familiarity of the other, contributed, I felt, to the poem's atmposphere. More often than not, though, I interpreted the meanings of place-names for the English reader, as in the example of "the slopes" for Mount Gilead.… I did not strive for consistency in making these choices; as elsewhere, my decisions were based on the demands of the individual poems and what I believed would allow maximum expression in English verse.

FIVE THEMES AND THEIR VARIATIONS

The themes I analyze here were isolated for various reasons: to point out conceptual connections among poems, to explain otherwise enigmatic material, and to illuminate the intellectual and emotional fabric from which the poems in the Song are cut. This analysis does not attempt to cover all the thematic material in the Song, but treats instead what plays a significant, though not necessarily obvious, role. The following five themes not only recur but overlap, representing interwoven threads of meaning in over half the poems of the Song:

1. beckoning the beloved (poems 1, 9, 10, 16, 24, 31);
2. banishment of the beloved—the theme of secret love (poems 12, 15, 31);
3. search for the beloved (poems 3, 13, 19);
4. the self in a hostile world (poems 2, 29, 30);
5. praise of love itself (poems 23, 28).

1. Beckoning the beloved, a classic theme in the Western courtly love tradition, is central in many of the love monologues and dialogues in the Song. Unlike the poetry of courtly love, however, in the Song both female and male speakers beckon—or make invitations to—the beloved. As might be expected, beckoning is often accompanied by praise; as a part of courting, beckoning is enhanced by the lavishing of compliments. Poems that share this theme portray the idealism and romanticism of courtship and often have a mood of wondrous expectation about them. Their tone tends to be flirtatious and often coy, though sometimes they are also quite passionate.

   The literary devices used to beckon the beloved are various. Sometimes praise and entreaties suffice, as in poems 1, 10, and 31. The speakers of poems 9 and 24 describe the lush countryside in an effort to induce their beloveds to join them there. The argument of these poems is that of the classic spring song: all of nature is mating—why not we too? Poem 16, in contrast, depicts an ominous landscape; the speaker urges his beloved to leave the danger, to "come away" with him.

   A linguistic feature associated with the theme of beckoning is the frequent use of verbal imperatives. "Take me away" (literally, "pull me") says the speaker of poem 1. In poems 9, 10, 16, and 24, the speakers use verbal imperatives to extend invitations, which I rendered consistently with the verb "come." I chose this verb in part to suggest thematic similarity among these poems, and partly because more literal translations ("get up," "show me," "go") lack the delicate evocativeness of the Hebrew. The first half of poem 31, which also uses an imperative, seemed to me so imploring in tone that I rendered the imperative as a request: "will you let me hear you?"

   In part, the pathos of these poems derives from the pain of the implied separation of the lovers and the strength of their desire to be united. Again, as distinct from the later poetry of the Western tradition, in these poems emotions are shared equally by both lovers, and may be expressed at different moments by either one of them. This mutuality only intensifies the pathos of separation in the Song. Separation is involved in other themes as well, and is crucial, as we shall see next, to the theme of secret love.

2. In poems 12 and 15 and in the second half of 31, the male lover / beloved either is chased away or voluntarily leaves the woman. Poems 12 and 31 may seem particularly puzzling, because the female speaker refers to her beloved with an endearing love name as she banishes him. In poem 31, she is responding to her lover's tender invitation, and one hardly expects her to be unfeeling. In fact, in neither poem is her tone angry or even aloof; yet she is firm in her commands: as in the passages of beckoning, verbal imperatives are used ("turn round" and "go," in my translation). What are we to make of this?

   The key to these poems lies, I believe, in viewing the romance as secret, an affair that can be consummated only at night, when the lovers are not exposed to public scrutiny. By chasing her beloved away in poems 12 and 31, the woman is not rejecting him, only exercising caution. The male speaker acts from the same motivation at the close of poem 15.

   This interpretation accounts for otherwise enigmatic statements that most standard Bible translations attempt to circumvent. For example, in the second stanza of poem 31 the female speaker responds to her lover's invitation with the rather abrupt-sounding command berah, which means, literally, "flee." Perhaps because this seems, on first reading, out of tone with the rest of the passage, the standard translations alter the meaning: the King James and Revised Standard Versions render berah as "make haste," and The New American Bible reads "come into the open." But there is no mistaking the meaning of the biblical Hebrew text. The word berah is neither rare nor ambiguous; it means nto "'come" or even "make haste," but "run away—flee."

   So too in the second stanza of poem 12, the female speaker tells her beloved to sov—literally, "turn," the implication being "turn away from me." Sov, in this passage, seems to be analogous to berah in poem 31, as we can see from reading further in each poem. Both commands are followed by elaborate instructions form the speakers: lines reading, literally, "make yourself, my beloved, like a gazelle or young stag on the split mountains" in poem 12, and "my beloved, make yourself like a gazelle or young stag on the mountains of spices" in poem 31. These lines—so similar as to sound almost like a refrain—seem to link the meaning and intention of the women's speech in the two poems.

   Finally, the same Hebrew lines that precede sov in poem 12—literally, "until the day breathes and the shadows disappear" (in my translation, "Until the day is over / And the shadows flee")—also precede the statement made by the male speaker at the end of poem 15. In the latter, the speaker voluntarily resolves to go away to the mountains / hills (here they are "the mountain of myrrh" and "the hill of frankincence," rendered together in my translation as "the hills / of fragrant bloom") "until the day breathes and the shadows disappear" (in my translation, "Until / the day is over, / shadows gone"). Thus, the closing of poem 15 seems also to be linked to the endings of poems 12 and 14; indeed, the situation of all three passages seems the same. In all three, the male lover is expected to remove himself from his beloved by running away to the hills; but the qualifying phrase "until the day is over" in poems 12 and 15 limits the duration of the separation. Underlying the explicit speech of all three poems is the unspoken understanding that the man will return to this beloved later—at night, when they will be out of public view.

   My reading of the phrase "until the day breathes" as "until the day is over" supports the above interpretation. Some scholars, however, take this phrase to mean "until the day breaks." Mine, I believe, is the simpler reading, in that it assumes the shadows are ordinary sun-shadows whose departure suggests day's end. Moreoever, in a hot Mediterranean climate the day indeed seems to breathe at dusk, when the afternoon wind rises and the air begins to cool.

   In our discussin of contexts, we saw that the public domain is unsympathetic to the lovers and that the city is the setting most threatening to the love relationship. Now we see that sometimes even in the countryside, where both male and female speakers express the desire to meet, the lovers feel that their rendezvous must be kept secret, confined to nighttime. This may be because of fear of public censure, or it may be a kind of fiction, part of a lovers' game. In either case, the theme of secret love explains otherwise baffling statements in at least three poems in the Song, and may deepen our understanding of other poems as well. For example, beckoning may now be seen as a counterpoint to secrecy: one lover coaxes while the other cautiously hides away. This explains the shyness and coyness of the hidden lover, and the fervor of the one extending the invitation.

   The role of the public, as it relates to the theme of secret love, has implications for the interpretation of yet other kinds of poems. It is especially important to the next two themes.

3. Searching for the beloved is the explicit theme of poems 13 and 19. Both poems open in the bedroom and then move into the city streets, where the speaker encounters the public world. In her search for her beloved, the female speaker of each poem first comes upon the city watchmen, who in poem 13 are unresponsive, and in poem 19 are actually brutal. These are the only two poems in which the figures of the guards appear, and it is difficult to speculate about their actual role in the society. However, as representatives of the public domain—groups of people outside the love relationship—they conform to a general pattern in the Song: they represent the real world, so to speak, against which the ideal world-of-two is contrasted.

   The city women constitute another such group that appears in several poems of the Song. Although never as threatening as the male guards, these figures are often aloof and sometimes hostile spectators, situated outside the love relationship. When their aid is solicited to find the lost beloved in poem 19, they respond at first with reluctance and suspicion: what's so special about your lover that we should bother to help you find him? But after the woman replies with a lengthy and detailed description of him, the women are eager to participate in the search. At this point, the speaker turns them away, affirming that she knows where to find her beloved after all. The closing of this poem suggests that the search for the beloved, frenzied though it seems, may be only a fiction or a game. In other terms, the search may be a metaphorical way of describing the loss that is felt whenever the beloved is not near, even if his whereabouts are known. Alternately, the conclusion of the poem may be a bluff, a desperate fantasy or wish. In either case, when the city women are ready to offer help, they are perceived as intruders. This perception may also explain why, in poem 13, the women are adjured not to wake or rouse the lovers, that is, not to disturb them in their lovemaking.…

   If we take the view that the urban searches in poems 13 and 19 are fictions or metaphors for feelings of loss, rather than actual odysseys into the streets, we may gain insight into the pastoral search that is the theme of poem 3. Here the speaker directly addresses her beloved with the request to know where she can find him while he is tending his flock, which is to say, during the daytime. The question, one deduces, is asked at night when the lovers are together and by themselves. The tone of the dialogue is coy rather than frantic, which is appropriate to a lovers' game. It is misguided to find the response of the male speaker cold or harshly evasive. The question itself is asked playfully, and the response implies that the woman is not really in need of an answer: "If you don't know," says the man—implying that she knows perfectly well where he may be found.

   While the woman addresses her beloved directly in this poem, she also makes reference to other individuals outside the intimate relationship. She does not, she says, want to go about begging directions from her lover's friends. The friends here play a role similar to that of the city women in other poems. Though they may not be hostile, neither can they be expected to be of much help. They too represent the public domain which is repeatedly in conflict with the lovers' wish to be united.

4. In poems 2 and 30, which make symbolic reference to erotic experience but are not specifically addressed to the beloved, we see yet another aspect of the role of figures outside the love relationship. Both these poems are monologues addressed to representatives of the public domain: the city women in one instance, King Solomon in the other. While neither Solomon nor the city women speak in these poems, we are invited to deduce their attitudes from the defiant and even indignant tones of the monologues.

   The purpose of the postures struck by the speakers of these poems is self-assertion; both speakers present themselves in contrast to the outside world. Thus in poem 2, the speaker asserts that she is black and beautiful, even though others—the city women—may consider her dark skin unattractive. In poem 30, the speaker argues that his vineyard—a symbol for his beloved—is more valuable to him than the vineyard of the king. In both poems, the security provided by the love relationship gives the speakers confidence and even a measure of audacity, with which they are able to confront the public world.

   Similarly, the female speaker in the dialogue poem 29 replies to the speech of her overprotective brothers with a declaration of her lover's regard for her. The men in this poem seem to have a punitive attitude toward their younger sister, who responds to them with a proud defiance of their authority. (The brothers referred to in poem 2 may have a similar attitude toward their sister.)

   Indignation, defiance, fear, and hostility are emotions that have their parts in the Song, emerging often, as we have seen, in connection with the public domain. We find in the Song that self-love, like love of the other, meets often with challenges from the outside world but finds constant support in the intimate world-of-two.

5. Explicit in only two poems, but implied in almost all the poems in the collection, is praise of love itself. As the opening lines of poem 23 exclaim, "Of all pleasure, how sweet / Is the taste of love!" While poem 23 does not pursue this thought explicitly, shifting instead to praise of the beloved, poem 28 is devoted almost entirely to praise of love. In this sense, poem 28 is unique in the collection, and distinguishes itself further by its use of hyperbole and singular imagery. It is the only poem in the Song that mentions death, pitting death against love in a contest for power. Love does not necessarily conquer death, the poem expounds, but neither is it conquered by it. Love blazes despite all attempts to put it out.

The opening lines of poem 23 and the middle stanzas of poem 28 make two different statements about love: whereas the one proclaims the sensual joy of love, the other asserts its power. These two appreciations represent the emotional range of the text. The themes treated above indicate that the fabric of the Song is not smooth and even-textured, but knotted with tension and struggle. These aspects of particular love relationships are proclaimed to be the nature of love itself in poems 23 and 28. Taken as a whole, the Song eloquently expresses some of the paradoxes of erotic love: conflict that intensifies passion, painful separation that heightens the pleasure of union, intimate bonding with the other that gives the individual courage to stand alone.

SIX CENTRAL MOTIFS

Interwoven among the dominant themes of the Song are other, more delicate strands of meaning: images and symbols embroidered into the design of the tapestry. These are what I call motifs; the following recur most often and seem most prominent:

1. flora and fauna, and artifice, as complementary sources of imagery;
2. the vines and the vineyard, as a special place and as metaphors and symbols;
3. the garden, as a special place and as an extended metaphor;
4. eating and drinking as erotic metaphors;
5. regality and wealth, as metaphors, figures, and foils;
6. sensuality and the senses.

1. The references to flora and fauna in the Song are so many and various that the Song has come to be thought of as nature poetry. It is true that "'nature poetry' is a clumsy term," as the poet Wendell Berry points out, "for there is a sense in which most poetry is nature poetry; most poets, even those least interested in nature, have found in the world an abundant stock of symbols and metaphors." But in the Song, flora and fauna are essential: they abound everywhere, in foregrounds and backgrounds, as real, metaphorical, and symbolic. Plants and animals appear as depictions of the natural landscape (as in poems 3, 6, 9, 16, 19, 21, 24, 27, and 31), as metaphors for the beloved (for example, in poems 4, 5, 7, 9, 10, 12, 18, 23, and 31), and as metaphors for parts of the human body (the best examples of these are in the wasfs). The animals in the Song include the mare, dove, gazelle, deer, nightingale ("songbird," in my translation), turtledove ("dove," in my translation), fox, lion, leopard, and raven. Most of these are identifiable by their biblical Hebrew names, although the standard English Bibles give somewhat differing translations for a few—for example, "stag" or "hart" for deer, "jackal" for fox. The plants mentioned in the Song are even more numerous—over twenty-five varieties of trees, shrubs, flowers, herbs, fruits, nuts, spices, and nectars—and their identification is more problematic. Because botanical images are so numerous and recurrent in the Song, I will comment on their identification, interpretation, and translation before discussing their relationship to the world of artifice.

   Like most botanical references in the Bible, those in the Song are difficult to identify because their biblical names do not necessarily correspond to modern Hebrew usage. For example, while today the word tappuah means "apple," it must have referred to something else in biblical times, because apples were not indigenous to ancient Israel. The translations in standard English Bibles and other versions of the Song tend to be misleading because the translators have hardly investigated the original referents of biblical plant names. And when modem versions do depart from the traditional renderings, they often do no more than guess at the meanings of these words; they rarely go so far as to attempt to determine the impact these images might have had in their original poetic contexts.

   I believe that faithful translation of botanical imagery in the Song has three stages: first, accurate identification of the referent of the biblical Hebrew plant name to the extent possible; second, interpretation of the effect of the image in its original poetic context; finally, choice of an English word or phrase that will both evoke the original landscape and ahve an analogous effect in the new context of the English poem.

   I was greatly assisted in the first stage by the findings of the research institute Neot Kedumim (the Gardens of Israel). The staff members at Neot Kedumim have done important work in the field of biblical botany; by consulting native speakers of languages that are cognate with Hebrew but that, unlike Hebrew, have retained the same common botanical names over the centuries, they have succeeded in identifying many of the plants named in the Bible. In addition, by cultivating and studying the terrain of present-day Israel, they have been able to make reasonable conjectures about the vegetation of biblical times. I considered the information provided by Neot Kedumim to be authoritative in most cases, and I used it as the basis for the next two stages, the interpretation of effect and the choice of English analogues.…

   [W]hen a flower was used in the Song as a metaphor, I tried first to determine the point of the comparison: was it visual beauty, or fragrance, or perhaps texture that was being called to mind? I then searched for an equivalent image in English, one that would have similar impact on the modern reader. When using specific names, I tried, as often as possible, to name in English the same plants named in the Hebrew; but if these plants had accrued, over the centuries, inappropiate associations (as with myrrh and frankincense), or if the English names sounded archaic or awkward, I found alternate expressions. In addition, I sometimes substituted descriptions for specific names (such as "sweet fruit tree growing wild" for tappuah …) and sometimes named plants of closely related species or having similar characteristics. I did not translate botanical images consistently from poem to poem, but let the demands of the individual poems guide my decisions. For example, I translated the oft-mentioned šo.šannah (narcissus) at different moments as "narcissus," "lily," "daffodil," "wildflower," and sometimes simply "flower"; in some cases I used different translations within a single poem, in order to stress a particular point in English.… Although I translated these images with considerable flexibility, I tried throughout to respect the integrity of the original landscape by never naming plants that could not have been part of it; I also did not name plants that would be totally unfamiliar to modern English readers.

   The decisions I made in translating botanical images were difficult because these images, more than most others, convey specific, culture-bound information that resists migration. Plants tend not to be hardy travelers, so one must take pains when carrying them across to new terrain, lest their vitality be endangered.

   Although plant and animal images are found throughout the Song, they are by no means the exclusive source of metaphor. Even in the wasfs, which rely heavily on natural imagery, metaphors are drawn from the realms of artifice—art, craft, and architecture—and these seem to mingle freely with metaphors from nature. Thus in the wasf of poem 19, the man's hair is black as a raven, his eyes are like doves, his cheeks like spices, his lips like flowers, and his stature or appearance like cedars in the mountains; but his arms are cylinders of gold studded with jewels, his belly is a slab of ivory inlaid with gems, and his legs are marble columns set on gold stands—all images evoking sculptural and architectural forms. Similarly, in the wasf of poem 15, the woman's lips are like threads of silk and her neck like a tower adorned with shields, images of artifice and architecture that are interspersed among images from nature—doves, goats, sheep, pomegranates, fawns. So too in the wasf of poem 22, thighs like spinning jewels suggest the artisan's handicraft, and the towerlike neck and face connote architectural grandeur, but the natural landscape—of wheat, flowers, pools, and mountains—lends images for other parts of the body.

   In addition, the artifice of military society provides images for some poems in the Song. The tower in poem 15 is hung with the shields of warriors; the wall, door, and turrets of poem 29 suggest the structure of a fortress; sixty sword-bearing warriors in poem 14 attend the procession of the king. It is fascinating to note that military imagery in the Song applies more often to descriptions of a female than of a male—one more example of the Song's reversal of our stereotypical expectations.

   Finally, the argument of poem 4 makes explicit what is implied throughout the Song: while the beloved is perceived as naturally beautiful, the speaker sees no harm adding artificial adornment; artifice does not compete with nature but complements it. Similar to other contrasts we have observed—such as between public and private domains or separation and union of lovers—the relationship between the natural world and the world of human artifacts is mutually intensifying and contributes to the density of the Song's texture.

2. The words gefen, "vine," and kerem, "vineyard," appear in eight poems in the Song, often more than once in each. I have translated these words in various ways—"vine," "vineyard," "grapevine," "grapes"—depending on the needs of the English poems. For the sake of this discussion, however, I will revert to a stricter distinction between the two Hebrew words. Gefen appears in poems 9, 21, 23, and 24; kerem, in poems 2, 5, 11, 24, and 30.

   In poems 9, 21 and 24, gefen refers to the grapevine in the stage of budding or early fruit, when it gives forth fragrance. All three of these poems are spring songs, and the gefen is one of the details in the springtime landscape. In all three, moreover, the budding vines are associated with erotic experience, invited or anticipated by one of the lovers. In poem 23, gefen appears in the phrase ešk^elot haggefen, "clusters of the vine"; here the reference is to the mature fruit, and I have rendered it "clusters of grapes." The poet evokes the smooth round fruit of the vine as a metaphor for the beloved's breasts.

   The word kerem is also used in various ways. In poem 24 it refers to a vineyard, which, like the fields where the henna blooms, is an appealing site for the lovers. In poem 5 it is associated with Ein Gedi, where, according to the poem, kofer, "henna" ("blossoms," in my translation), is found. Because Ein Gedi is an oasis in the desert and henna does not grow on vines, the kerem of poem 5 seems to be not a vineyard but a general place of vegetation, and I have rendered it here as "oasis."

   While in both poems 5 and 24 kerem refers to a place of vegetation, a wider range of meanings is suggested in poems 2, 11, and 30, because it is impossible to interpret these poems coherently without a symbolic reading. In each of these poems, kerem is mentioned several times, and once in each it is in the first person-possessive: "my vineyard" in poems 2 and 30, "our vineyards" in poem 11. In poems 2 and 30 an emphatic modifier, šelli, "mine," follows the possessive karmi, "my vineyard." The female speaker of poem 2 says that she has been made to watch the vineyards (although the Hebrew does not specify whose these are, we may deduce from the context that they belong to the speaker's brothers) and meanwhile she has not watched her own. The male speaker of poem 30 says that Solomon has a prosperous vineyard but that his, the speaker's, own vineyard is more precious to him than Solomon's. Both poems suggest that the vineyard is to be understood as more than a literal place; at least when referred to in the possessive form, it seems to be also a symbol for female sexuality. Thus when the woman speaks of her vineyard, she refers to herself; when the man speaks of his own vineyard, he refers to his beloved. In poem 2, the woman alludes to not having guarded her own sexuality; in poem 30, the speaker asserts that his beloved is not to be shared with anyone else.

   Poem 11 contains the most cryptic of all the references to kerem, because here it is unclear who is speaking and to whom. But once again the poem makes most sense if we understand the kerem symbolically: the foxes (a masculine noun in the Hebrew) are raiding the vineyards and therefore must be caught; if the "little foxes" are young men, might the vineyards be young women?

   It should not be disconcerting to find kerem used in several different ways in the collection. The accumulated meanings enhance the resonance of each occurrence of the motif, and from this layering comes textual richness.

3. The garden, like the vineyard, appears in several different poems in the Song, sometimes as a location and sometimes as a metaphor for the female beloved. Even when it refers to a location, however, it is generally associated with the woman, and it sometimes simultaneously symbolizes her.

   In poem 31, the garden is the place where the female beloved is situated; in the penultimate stanza of poem 19, it is a place entered by a male. The walnut orchard of poem 21 is literally a "walnut garden," to which the speaker "goes down" ("walking," in my translation) to observe the opening of the flowers. In poem 19, the male "has gone down" to "his garden" to feed his sheep and gather flowers. The links between these two passages—the same verb and the similar references to flowers or flowering—make a strong argument for viewing the otherwise unidentifiable speaker of poem 21 as male. The association of the garden with the female beloved in poem 31 further suggests a symbolic level of meaning in poems 19 and 21: the garden represents the female beloved, who is "gone down to" by the male; the gathering and eating of flowers may be read as the male's erotic play on the woman's body, and the opening of the flowers as the woman's response.

   In poem 18, the garden is explicitly erotic, functioning as an extended metaphor that describes the beloved. The word gan, "garden," appears five times in the Hebrew poem, three times in the possessive ("my garden" and "his garden"). Like the vineyard in poems 2 and 30, the garden in poem 18 can belong to either the woman or the man, but it seems to refer in both cases to the woman herself or to her sexuality. Thus the female speaker calls upon the winds to breathe on ganni, "my garden," invoking her beloved to come to ganno, "his garden." These two references are, of course, to the same garden, and to avoid confusion in the English I omitted the phrase "his garden" here. In the following stanza the male speaker replies that he has come to "my garden," thus accepting the gift that the woman has offered.

   As in poem 19, the male speaker in poem 18 gathers plants (this time spices rather than flowers) in his garden, and also feasts there. Because poem 18 is controlled by an extended metaphor in which the female is compared to the garden itself, to the water that flows in it, and to all the varieties of vegetation (fruits, flowers, woods, spices) that grow in it, the activities of the male in the garden—entering, gathering, and eating—are also to be seen as erotic. The use of the garden as an extended metaphor in poem 18 … suggests ways to view the motif of eating and drinking in other poems as well.

4. The Hebrew word-root , kl, "eat," appears three times in the Song, all in poem 19, where I have translated it variously as "share," "taste," and "feast"—verbs that build in intensity as they approach the poem's climax. The female speaker in the poem expresses the wish that her beloved will come to his garden and eat ("share") its choice fruits; the male speaker replies that he has come to gather spices, to eat ("taste") his honey and drink his wine and milk. At the conclusion of the poem, a third voice invites the two lovers to eat ("feast") and drink, even to the point of intoxication ("drink deeply," in my translation). Clearly, eating and drinking are symbols of erotic experience; the association of eating and drinking with the garden, and with the activity of gathering in particular, suggests that eroticism is implied also in other settings where eating and drinking occur.

   For example, in the penultimate stanza of poem 19, the woman says that her beloved has gone down to his garden lir 'ot, "to pasture" (in my version, "to feed his sheep"), and to gather flowers. In the last stanza she refers to him as haro 'eh bassosannim, "the one who pastures among the flowers," an appellation that appears in poem 12 as well (I translate the phrase, in both instances, "Who leads his flock to feed / Among the flowers"). The Hebrew word for pasturing, or feeding one's flocks, also appears in poem 3: there the female speaker asks her beloved where he pastures ("where you feed your sheep," in my version), and the male speaker replies by telling her to pasture her own flocks among the fields of the other "ones who pasture" ("the shepherds," in my translation). In all these cases where the word-root r'h appears, there is an implied second level of meaning. Because pasturing is associated with the garden, with flowers, and with gathering—all of which have erotic connotations, the more so when they appear in combination—there is the strong suggestion that pasturing means not only feeding one's flock but feeding oneself in the act of love. Because the garden and its flowers are, as we have seen, often associated with the female body, pasturing is usually symbolic of male sexual activity. The one who pastures in the flowers is always a male (although poem 3 contains a reference to a woman who pastures, flowers are not mentioned in that instance).

   Other, more direct references to the activities of eating and drinking, however, are not restricted to males; these too have erotic associations. In poem 7, the female speaker says that her beloved's fruit is sweet to her palate ("I taste your love," in my translation); here the male is compared to a fruit tree, and the speaker finds pleasure in dwelling in his shadow and tasting his fruit. In poem 8, the female speaker asks to be refreshed and sustained with raisincakes and quinces—an unusual request from one who is "sick with love." It seems that her hunger is not so much for cakes and fruits as for her lover's embraces, about which she fantasizes in the succeeding lines.

   The food in the Song most emphatically associated with lovemaking is wine. More than once it is mentioned by way of complimenting a beloved: for example, that her mouth is like good wine (poem 23), or that her lovemaking is better than wine (poem 17), or that his lovemaking is better than wine (poem 1). The speaker of poem 17 goes on to praise his beloved in detail, not failing to mention the taste of honey and milk on her tongue, thus making explicit the association between lovemaking and food. Honey and milk (probably a "fixed pair," a convention of oral poetry) are linked with wine in poem 18 as well. In both poems, honey and milk lend added sweetness to the imagery of the wine and reinforce its erotic overtones.

   The imagery of wine is perhaps nowhere more erotic, however, than in poem 25, where it is in parallel position to the nectar of pomegranates. The speaker of this poem offers to take her beloved to her mother's home, where she will give him spiced wine and the juice of her pomegranate to drink. The pomegranate, long recognized as a fertility symbol in ancient culture, is mentioned in connection with females several times in the Song: as a fruit of the gardens in poems 18 and 21, and as a metaphor for the woman's forehead in the wasfs. In poem 25 it seems to be a symbol, like the vineyard, of the woman's sexuality, an image that the first person possessive, "my pomegranate," emphasizes. The lines that follow are the same as those that follow the request for food in poem 8 (which, incidentally, takes place in a winehall); and in both instances, the allusions to feasting lead into the woman's fantasy of her beloved's embrace. Feasting, it seems, always has erotic overtones in the Song, and wine is the most intoxicating temptation to the feast.

5. Like the other motifs discussed here, regality is treated in various ways in the Song, but unlike the others, its connotations can be either positive or negative. Thus, when the beloved is compared to a king, as in poems I and 5, the regal image is clearly a compliment, a way of expressing affection and esteem. This is also the effect of calling the woman a princess in poem 22, and of stating, in the same poem, that she captures kings in the tresses of her hair—as if to say that her beauty is capable of attracting anyone. In poem 2, the image of King Solomon's tapestries also has positive associations: it is a metaphor for the speaker's black and lovely skin.

   But in other poems, regality acts as a foil for the speaker or the beloved. The most vehement assertion is in poem 30, in which the speaker contrasts his own vineyard with the king's and proclaims his own to be superior. Similarly, but without the tone of defiance, the speaker of poem 20 sets his beloved against a backdrop of sixty queens, and proclaims her so remarkable that even the regal figures sing her praises. In both poems, the speaker contrasts the uniqueness of his beloved with the multitude of the regal holdings. The vineyard in poem 30 yields great wealth for its owner (the Hebrew specifies a thousand pieces of silver); in poem 20, the queens, concubines ("brides," in my translation), and young women, who are all possessions of the king, number in the scores. But these large numbers, signifying affluence and luxury, cannot compete, in the speaker's eyes, with his one, own beloved. He would not, he declares in poem 30, trade his beloved for all of Solomon's harem.

   Wealth cannot compete with love, suggest the speakers of these poems. The female speaker of poem 28 asserts even more emphatically that a man is to be scorned if he attempts to buy love in the marketplace. Even were he to offer, as the Hebrew indicates, "all the wealth of his house," he could never purchase love with money.

   Wealth, however, like regality, has more than one connotation in the Song. In poem 4 the speaker offers to adorn his beloved with gold and silver, gifts offered in the spirit of love. In poem 14, the poem in which regality is most central, the splendors of wealth—gold, silver, and cedar—adorn the king's wedding procession. The exquisite appeals of the imagery—the smells of the incense, the colors of the carriage—make regality and wealth seem enthralling; as fervently as they are elsewhere scorned, they are here celebrated. This discrepancy in attitudes toward the figure of the king attests again to the benefit of reading the poems of the Song as discrete units rather than parts of a unified whole.

6. It should by now be apparent that the Song is a text extraordinarily rich with sensory imagery. By far the most prevalent sensory material in the text is visual (especially in the wasfs); in addition, references to sight and to visions recur in several places (in poem 20; also in poem 17, where a flash of the beloved's eyes thrills the heart). References to smell are also abundant, as in the many mentions of flowers, fruits, spices, perfumes, and even the aroma of the Lebanon mountains. The sense of taste is evoked in several poems, always seeming to suggest erotic experience. Sound is used less metaphorically, but the sounds of voices are important erotic enticements (as in poems 9, 10, 19, and 31); and, of course, sound-plays are essential in the construction of the Hebrew verse itself, alliteration being a common poetic device. The sense of touch is evoked with every wish for the lover's embrace (for example, in the couplets preceding the adjuration in poems 8 and 25) and is further implied in some of the more elusive metaphors (breasts "like fawns" in poems 15 and 22, and like "clusters of grapes" in poem 23). Finally, synesthesia is used to striking effect in poem 1, where a name, as remembered or heard, is associated with a fragrance.…

While I have not treated each of the senses as a separate motif, their importance is, I hope, apparent from the discussions of the other motifs to which they relate. Indeed, there is probably nothing more essential to appreciation of poetic effect in the Song than a readiness to respond to sensuality.