[In the following essay, Alter conducts a close formal analysis of the Song of Songs as poetry, exploring the work's imagery and metaphor. Alter finds the Song a rare instance in biblical poetry of "uninhibited self-delighting play" and "elegant aesthetic form."]

The Song of Songs comprises what are surely the most exquisite poems that have come down to us from ancient Israel, but the poetic principles on which they are shaped are in several ways instructively untypical of biblical verse. When it was more the scholarly fashion to date the book late, either in the Persian period (W. F. Albright) or well into the Hellenistic period (H. L. Ginsberg), these differences might have been attributed to changing poetic practices in the last centuries of biblical literary activity. Several recent analysts, however, have persuasively argued that all the supposed stylistic and lexical evidence for a late date is ambiguous, and it is quite possible, though not demonstrable, that these poems originated, whatever subsequent modifications they may have undergone, early in the First Commonwealth period.

The most likely sources of distinction between the Song of Songs and the rest of biblical poetry lie not in chronology but in genre, in purpose, and perhaps in social context. Although there are some striking love motifs elsewhere in biblical poetry—in Psalms, between man and God, in the Prophets, between God and Israel—the Song of Songs is the only surviving instance of purely secular love poetry from ancient Israel. The erotic symbolism of the Prophets would provide later ages an effective warrant for reading the Song of Songs as a religious allegory, but in fact the continuous celebration of passion and its pleasures makes this the most consistently secular of all biblical texts—even more so than Proverbs, which for all its pragmatic worldly concerns also stresses the fear of the Lord and the effect of divine justice on the here and now. We have no way of knowing the precise circumstances under which or for which the Song of Songs was composed. A venerable and persistent scholarly theory sees it as the (vestigial?) liturgy of a fertility cult; others—to my mind, more plausibly—imagine it as a collection of wedding songs. What I should like to reject at the outset is the whole quest for the "life-setting" of the poems—because it is, necessarily, a will-o'-the-wisp and, even more, because it is a prime instance of the misplaced concreteness that has plagued biblical research, which naively presumes that the life-setting, if we could recover it, would somehow provide the key to the language, structure, and meaning of the poems.

The imagery of the Song of Songs is a curious mixture of pastoral, urban, and regal allusions, which leaves scant grounds for concluding whether the poems were composed among shepherds or courtiers or somewhere in between. References in rabbinic texts suggest that at least by the Roman period the poems were often sung at weddings, and, whoever composed them, there is surely something popular about these lyric celebrations of the flowering world, the beauties of the female and male bodies, and the delights of lovemaking. The Wisdom poetry of Job and Proverbs was created by members of what one could justifiably call the ancient Israelite intelligentsia. Prophetic verse was produced by individuals who belonged—by sensibility and in several signal instances by virtue of social background as well—to a spiritual-intellectual elite. The psalms were tied to the cult, and at least a good many of them were probably created in priestly circles (the mimetic example of short prayers embedded in biblical narrative suggests that ordinary people, in contradistinction to the professional psalm-poets, may have improvised personal prayers in simple prose). It is only in the Song of Songs that there is no one giving instruction or exhortation, no leader or hierophant, no memorializer of national experience, but instead the voices of two lovers, praising each other, yearning for each other, proffering invitations to enjoy. I shall not presume to guess whether these poems were composed by folk poets, but it is clear that their poetic idiom is one that, for all its artistic sophistication, is splendidly accessible to the folk, and that may well be the most plausible explanation for the formal differences from other kinds of biblical poetry.

To begin with, semantic parallelism is used here with a freedom one rarely encounters in other poetic texts in the Bible. Since virtually the whole book is a series of dramatic addresses between the lovers, this free gliding in and out of parallelism—the very antithesis of the neat boxing together of matched terms in Proverbs—may be dictated in part by the desire to give the verse the suppleness and liveliness of dramatic speech. Thus the very first line of the collection: "Let him kiss me with the kisses of his mouth, / for your love is better than wine." The relation of the second verses to the first is not really parallelism but explanation—and a dramatically appropriate one at that, which is reinforced by the move from third person to second: your kisses, my love are more delectable than wine, which is reason enough for me to have declared at large my desire for them.

In many lines, the second verset is a prepositional or adverbial modifier of the first verset—a pattern we have encountered occasionally elsewhere but which here sometimes occurs in a whole sequence of lines, perhaps as part of an impulse to apprehend the elaborate and precious concreteness of the object evoked instead of finding a matching term for it. Here, for example, is the description of Solomon's royal palanquin:

1 Who is this coming up from the desert
  like columns of smoke
2 Perfumed with myrrh and frankincense
  of all the merchant's powders?
3 Look, Solomon's couch,
  sixty warriors round it
  of the warriors of Israel,
4 All of them skilled with sword,
  trained in war,
5 Each with sword on thigh,
  for terror in the nights.
6 A litter King Solomon made him
  of wood from Lebanon.
7 Its posts he made of silver,
  its bolster gold,
  its cushion purple wool,
8 Its inside decked with love
  by the daughters of Jerusalem.

The only strictly parallelistic lines here are 4 and 7. For the rest, the poet seems to be reaching in his second (and third) versets for some further realization of the object, of what it is like, where it comes from: What surrounds Solomon's couch? Why are the warriors arrayed with their weapons? Who is it who has so lovingly upholstered the royal litter?

Now, the picture of a perfumed cloud ascending from the desert, with a splendid palanquin then revealed to the eye of the beholder, first with its entourage, afterward with its luxurious fixtures, also incorporates narrative progression; and because the collection involves the dramatic action of lovers coming together or seeking one another (though surely not, as some have fancied, in a formal drama), narrativity is the dominant pattern in a number of the poems. Such narrativity is of course in consonance with a general principle of parallelistic verse in the Bible, as one can see clearly in single lines like this: "Draw me after you, let us run—/ the king has brought me to his chambers." The difference is that in the Song of Songs there are whole poems in which all semblance of semantic equivalence between versets is put aside for the sake of narrative concatenation from verses to verses and from line to line. I will quote the nocturnal pursuit of the lover at the beginning of Chapter 3, with which one may usefully compare the parallel episode in 5:2-8 that works on the same poetic principle:

I On my bed at night
I sought the one I so love,
I sought him, did not find him.
2 Let me rise and go round the town,
in the streets and squares
3 Let me seek the one I so love,
I sought him, did not find him.
4 The watchmen going round the town found
  me—
"Have you seen the one I so love?"
5 Scarce had I passed them
when I found the one I so love.
6 I held him, would not loose him,
till I brought him to my mother's house,
to the chamber of her who conceived me.

In this entire sequence of progressive actions, the only moment of semantic equivalence between versets is in the second and third versets of the last line, and the focusing movement there from house to chamber is subsumed under the general narrative pattern: the woman first gets a tight grip on her lover, then brings him to her mother's house, and finally introduces him into the chamber (perhaps the same one in which she was lying at the beginning of the sequence).

This brief specimen of narrative reflects two other stylistic peculiarities of the Song of Songs. Although the collection as a whole makes elaborate and sometimes extravagant use of figurative language, when narrative governs a whole poem, as in 3:1-4 and 5:2-8, figuration is entirely displaced by the report of sequenced actions. There are no metaphors or similes in these six lines, and, similarly, in the description of the palanquin coming up from the desert to Jerusalem that we glanced at, the only figurative language is "like columns of smoke" at the beginning (where the original reading may in fact have been "in columns of smoke") and "decked with love" at the end (where some have also seen a textual problem). The second notable stylistic feature of our poem is the prominence of verbatim repetition. Through the rapid narrative there is woven a thread of verbal recurrences that, disengaged, would sound like this: I sought the one I so love, I sought him, did not find him, let me seek the one I so love, I sought him, did not find him, the one I so love, I found the one I so love. This device has a strong affinity with the technique of incremental repetition that is reflected in the more archaic layers of biblical poetry (the most memorable instance being the Song of Deborah). In the Song of Songs, however, such repetition is used with a degree of flexibility one does not find in the archaic poems, and is especially favored in vocative forms where the lover adds some item of enraptured admiration to the repetition: "Oh, you are fair, my darling, / oh, you are fair, your eyes are doves." One finds the increment as well in the explanatory note of a challenge: "How is your lover more than another, / fairest of women, 11 how is your lover more than another, / that thus you adjure us?" One notices that there is a sense of choreographic balance lacking in the simple use of incremental repetition because in both these lines an initial element ("my darling," "fairest of women") is subtracted as the increment is added. In any case, the closeness to incremental repetition is not necessarily evidence of an early date but might well reflect the more popular character of these love poems, folk poetry and its sophisticated derivatives being by nature conservative in their modes of expression.

The most telling divergence from quasi-synonymous parallelism in the Song of Songs is the use of one verset to introduce a simile and of the matching verses to indicate the referent of the simile: "Like a lily among brambles, / so is my darling among girls. 11 Like an apple tree among forest trees, / so is my lover among lads." The same pattern appears, with a very different effect, in some of the riddle-form proverbs. In the Song of Songs, such a pattern makes particular sense because, more than in any other poetic text of the Bible, what is at issue in the poems is the kind of transfers of meaning that take place when one thing is represented in terms of or through the image of something else, and the "like … /s o …" formula aptly calls our attention to the operation of the simile. With the exception of the continuously narrative passages I have mentioned, figurative language plays a more prominent role here than anywhere else in biblical poetry, and the assumptions about how figurative language should be used have shifted in important respects.

The fact is that in a good deal of biblical poetry imagery serves rather secondary purposes, or sometimes there is not very much of it, and in any case "originality" of metaphoric invention would not appear to have been a consciously prized poetic value. Let me propose that outside the Song of Songs one can observe three general categories of imagery in biblical poems: avowedly conventional images, intensive images, and innovative images. Conventional imagery accounts for the preponderance of cases, and the Book of Psalms is the showcase for the artful use of such stock images. Intensive imagery in most instances builds on conventional metaphors and similes, with the difference that a particular figure is pursued and elaborated through several lines or even a whole poem, so that it is given a kind of semantic amplitude or powerfully assertive pressure. Intensive imagery occurs sometimes in Psalms, fairly often in Job, and is the figurative mode par excellence of prophetic poetry. Innovative imagery is the rarest of the three categories, but it can occur from time to time in any genre of biblical verse simply because poetry is, among other things, a way of imagining the world through inventive similitude, and poets, whatever their conventional assumptions, may on occasion arrest the attention of their audience through an original or startling image. The highest concentration of innovative imagery in the Bible is evident in the Book of Job, which I would take to be not strictly a generic matter but more a reflection of the poet's particular genius and his extraordinary ability to imagine disconcerting realities outside the frame of received wisdom and habitual perception. Let me offer some brief examples of all three categories of imagery in order to make this overview of biblical figuration more concrete, which in turn should help us see more clearly the striking difference of the Song of Songs.

Stock imagery, as I have intimated, is the staple of biblical poetry, and Psalms is the preeminent instance of its repeated deployment. Here is an exemplary line: "Guard me like the apple of Your eye, / in the shadow of Your wings conceal me." Both the apple of the eye as something to be cherished and the shadow of wings as a place of shelter are biblical cliches, though the two elements are interestingly connected here by a motif of darkness (the concentrated dark of the pupil and the extended shadow of wings) and linked in a pattern of intensification that moves from guarding to hiding.

There may be, then, a certain effective orchestration of the semantic fields of the metaphors, but in regard to the purpose of the psalm, the advantage of working with such conventional figures is that our attention tends to be guided through the metaphoric vehicle to the tenor for which the vehicle was introduced. In fact, as Benjamin Hrushovski has recently argued, there is a misleading implication of unidirectional movement in those very terms "tenor" and "vehicle," coined for critical usage by 1. A. Richards some six decades ago, and when we return to the Song of Songs we will see precisely why the unidirectional model of metaphor is inappropriate. In the frequent biblical use, however, of stock imagery, the relation between metaphor and referent actually approaches that of a vehicle—that is, a mere "carrier" of meaning—to a tenor. In our line from Psalms, what the speaker, pleading for divine help, wants to convey is a sense of the tender protection he asks of God. The apple of the eye and the shading of wings communicate his feeling for the special care he seeks, but in their very conventionality the images scarcely have a life of their own. We think less about the dark of the eye and the shadow of wings than about the safeguarding from the Lord for which the supplicant prays.

Since I have pulled this line out of context, let me refer with a comment on the whole poem to the use of cliche in just one other fairly typical psalm, Psalm 94. In the twenty-three lines of this poem, which calls quite impressively on the Lord as a "God of retribution" to destroy His enemies, there are only four lines that contain any figurative language. How minimal and how conventional such language is will become clear by the quoting in sequence of these four isolated instances of figuration: "The Lord knows the designs of man, / that they are mere breath;" "… until a pit is dug for the wicked;" "When I thought my foot had slipped, / Your faithfulness, Lord, supported me;" "But the Lord is my stronghold, / and my God is my sheltering rock." Pitfall, stumbling, and stronghold occur time after time in biblical poetry, and their role in this otherwise nonfigurative poem is surely no more than a minor amplification of the idea that security depends upon God. The metaphor of breath or vapor may to the modern glance seem more striking, but it is in fact such a conventional designation for insubstantiality in the Bible that modern translations that render it unmetaphorically as "futile" do only small violence to the original.

We have seen a number of instances of intensive imagery in our discussion of prophetic poetry and of structures of intensification, but since the focus of those considerations was not on figurative language, one brief example from the prophets may be useful. Here is Deutero-Isaiah elaborating a metaphor in order to contrast the ephemerality of humankind and the power and perdurability of God:

All flesh is grass,
all its faithfulness like the flower of the field.
Grass withers, flower fades
when the Lord's breath blows on them.
Grass withers, flower fades,
and the word of the Lord stands forever.

The metaphor of grass for transience is thoroughly conventional, but the poet gives it an intensive development through these three lines in the refrain-like repetition of the key phrases; the amplification of grass with flower (a vegetal figure that involves beauty and still more fragility and ephemerality, as flowers wither more quickly than grass); and in the contrast between grass and God's breath-wind-spirit (ruah). God's power is a hot wind that makes transient growing things wither, but God's spirit is also the source of His promise to Israel, through covenant and prophecy, which will be fulfilled or "stand" (yaqum) forever while human things and human faithfulness vanish in the wilderness of time. One sees how a cliche has been transformed into poignantly evocative poetry, and here the frame of reference of the metaphor, ephemeral things flourishing, interpenetrates the frame of reference of Israel vis-á-vis God as the pitfalls and strongholds of Psalms do not do to the objects or ideas to which they allude.

Finally, the Job poet abundantly interweaves with such intensive developments of conventional figures forcefully innovative images that carry much of the burden of his argument. Sometimes the power of these images depends on an elaboration of their implications for two or three lines, as in this representation of human life as backbreaking day labor tolerable only because of the prospect of evening / death as surcease and recompense: "Has not man a term of service on earth, / and like the days of a hireling his days? 11 Like a slave he pants for the shadows, / like a hireling he waits for his wage." Sometimes we find a rapid flow of innovative figures that in its strength from verset to verset seems quite Shakespearian, as in these images of the molding of man in the womb: "Did You not pour me out like milk, / curdle me like cheese? / / With skin and flesh You clothed me, / with bones and sinews wove me?" The brilliantly resourceful Job poet also offers a more compact version of the innovative image, in which an otherwise conventional term is endowed with terrific figurative power because of the context in which it is set. Thus, the verb sabo 'a, "to be satisfied" or "sated," is extremely common in biblical usage, for the most part in literal or weakly figurative utterances, but this is how Job uses it to denounce the Friends: "Why do you pursue me like God, / and from my flesh you are not sated?" In context, especially since Job has just been talking about his bones sticking to his flesh and skin, the otherwise bland verb produces a horrific image of cannibalism, which manages to say a great deal with awesome compression about the perverted nature of the Friends' relationship to the stricken Job.

The innovative image by its forcefulness strongly colors our perception of its referent: once we imagine the Friends cannibalizing Job's diseased and wasted flesh, we can scarcely dissociate the words they speak and their moral intentions from this picture of barbaric violence. What remains relatively stable, as in the two other general categories of biblical imagery, is the subordinate relation of image to referent. We are never in doubt that Job's subject is the Friends' censorious behavior toward him, not cannibalism, or the shaping of the embryo, not cheese-making and weaving. By contrast, what makes the Song of Songs unique among the poetic texts of the Bible is that, quite often, imagery is given such full and free play there that the lines of semantic subordination blur, and it becomes a little uncertain what is illustration and what is referent.

It should be observed, to begin with, that in the Song of Songs the process of figuration is frequently "foregrounded"—which is to say, as the poet takes expressive advantage of representing something through an image that brings out a salient quality it shares with the referent, he calls our attention to his exploitation of similitude, to the artifice of metaphorical representation. One lexical token of this tendency is that the verbal root d-m-h, "to be like," or, in another conjugation, the transitive "to liken," which occurs only thirty times in the entire biblical corpus (and not always with this meaning), appears five times in these eight brief chapters of poetry, in each instance flaunting the effect of figurative comparison. Beyond this lexical due, the general frequency of simile is itself a "laying bare" of the artifice, making the operation of comparison explicit in the poem's surface structure.

The first occurrence of this verb as part of an ostentatious simile is particularly instructive because of the seeming enigma of the image: "To a mare among Pharaoh's chariots / I would liken you, my darling." Pharoah's chariots were drawn by stallions, but the military stratagem alluded to has been clearly understood by commentators as far back as the classical Midrashim: a mare in heat, let loose among chariotry, could transform well-drawn battle lines into a chaos of wildly plunging stallions. This is obviously an instance of what I have called innovative imagery, and the poet—or, if one prefers, the speaker—is clearly interested in flaunting the innovation. The first verset gives us a startling simile, as in the first half of a riddle-form proverb; the second verset abandons semantic parallelism for the affirmation of simile making ("I would liken you" or, perhaps, "I have likened you") together with the specification in the vocative of the beloved referent of the simile. The lover speaks out of a keen awareness of the power of figurative language to break open closed frames of reference and make us see things with a shock of new recognition: the beloved in poem after poem is lovely, gentle, dovelike, fragrant, but the sexual attraction she exerts also has an almost violent power to drive males to distraction, as the equine military image powerfully suggests.

It is not certain whether the next two lines, which evoke the wreaths of jewels and precious metals with which the beloved should be adorned, are a continuation of the mare image (referring, that is, to ornaments like those with which a beautiful mare might be adorned) or the fragment of an unrelated poem. I would prefer to see these lines as an extension of the mare simile because that would be in keeping with a general practice in the Song of Songs of introducing a poetic comparison and then exploring its ramifications through several lines. A more clear-cut example occurs in these three lines, which also happen to turn on the next occurrence of the symptomatic verb d-m-h:

Hark! My lover, here he comes!
bounding over the mountains,
loping over the hills.
My lover is like a buck
or a young stag.
Here he stands behind our wall,
peering in at the windows,
peeping through the lattice.

This poem, which continues with the lover's invitation to the woman to come out with him into the vernal countryside, begins without evident simile: the waiting young woman simply hears the rapidly approaching footsteps of her lover and imagines him bounding across the hills to her home. What the middle line, which in the Hebrew begins with the verb of likening, domeh, does is to pick up a simile that has been pressing just beneath the verbal surface of the preceding line and to make it explicit—all the more explicit because the speaker offers overlapping alternatives of similitude, a buck or a young stag. The third line obviously continues the stag image that was adumbrated in the first line and spelled out in the second, but its delicate beauty is in part a function of the poised ambiguity as to what is foreground and what is background. It is easy enough to picture a soft-eyed stag, having come down from the hills, peering in through the lattice; it is just as easy to see the eager human lover, panting from his run, looking in at his beloved. The effect is the opposite of the sort of optical trick in which a design is perceived at one moment as a rabbit and the next as a duck but never as both at once, because through the magic of poetic likening the figure at the lattice is simultaneously stag and lover. What I would call the tonal consequence of this ambiguity is that the lover is entirely assimilated into the natural world at the same time that the natural world is felt to be profoundly in consonance with the lovers. This perfectly sets the stage for his invitation to arise and join him in the freshly blossoming landscape, all winter rains now gone.

A variant of the line about the buck occurs in another poem at the end of the same chapter, and there is something to be learned from the different position and grammatical use of the verb of similitude:

My lover is mine and I am his,
  who browses among the lilies.
Until day breathes and shadows flee,
Turn, and be you, my love, like a buck,
  or a young stag
  on the cleft mountains.

The verb "browses," ro 'eh, which when applied to humans means "to herd" and would not make sense in that meaning here, requires a figurative reading from the beginning. The only landscape, then, in this brief poem is metaphorical: the woman is inviting her lover to a night of pleasure, urging him to hasten to enjoy to the utmost before day breaks. The lilies and the "cleft mountains"—others, comparing the line to 8:14, render this "mountains of spice," which amounts to the same erotic place—are on the landscape of her body, where he can gambol through the night. What is especially interesting in the light of our previous examples is that the verb of similitude occurs not in the speaker's declaration of likeness but in an imperative: "be you, my love, like [demeh le] a buck." The artifice of poetry thus enters inside the frame of dramatic action represented through the monologue: the woman tells her man that the way he can most fully play the part of the lover is to be like the stag, to act out the poetic simile, feeding on these lilies and cavorting upon this mount of intimate delight.

Of the two other occurrences of the verb d-m-h in the Song of Songs, one is a variant of the line we have just considered, appearing at the very end of the book and possibly detached from context. The other occurrence provides still another instructive instance of how this poetry rides the momentum of metaphor:

This stature of yours is like the palm,
  your breasts like the clusters.
I say, let me climb the palm,
  let me hold its branches.
Let your breast be like grape clusters,
  your breath like apples,
Your palate like goodly wine
  flowing for my love smoothly,^*
  stirring^* the lips of sleepers.

The speaker first announces his controlling simile, proclaiming that his beloved's stately figure is like (damte le) the palm. The second verset of the initial line introduces a ramification—quite literally, a "branching out"—of the palm image or, in terms of the general poetics of parallelism, focuses it by moving from the tree to the fruit-laden boughs. The next line is essentially an enactment of the simile, beginning with "I say," which Marvin Pope quite justifiably renders as "methinks" because the verb equally implies intention and speech. The simile ceases to be an "illustration" of some quality (the stately stature of the palm tree in the woman) and becomes a reality that impels the speaker to a particular course of action: if you are a palm, what is to be done with palm trees is to climb them and enjoy their fruit. The last two lines of the poem sustain the sense of a virtually real realm of simile by piling on a series of images contiguous with the initial one but not identical with it: from clusters of dates to grape clusters, from branches to apples, from the breath of the mouth and from grapes to wine-sweet kisses.

Another reflection of the poetics of flaunted figuration that contributes to the distinctive beauty of the Song of Songs is the flamboyant elaboration of the metaphor in fine excess of its function as the vehicle for any human or erotic tenor. In terms of the semantic patterns of biblical parallelism, this constitutes a special case of focusing, in which the second or third verset concretizes or characterizes a metaphor introduced in the first verset in a way that shifts attention from the frame of reference of the referent to the frame of reference of the metaphor. Let me quote from the exquisite poem addressed to the dancing Shulamite in Chapter 7 the vertical description of the woman, ascending from feet to head.

1 How lovely your feet in sandals,
  nobleman's daughter!
2 Your curving thighs are like ornaments,
  the work of a master's hand.
3 Your sex a rounded bowl—
  may it never lack mixed wine!
4 Your belly a heap of wheat,
  hedged about with lilies.
5 Your two breasts like two fawns,
  twins of a gazelle.
6 Your neck like an ivory tower,
  your eyes pools in Heshbon
7 Your nose like the tower of David,
  by the gate of Bat-Rabbim.
8 Your head on you like crimson wool,
  looking out toward Damascus,
  the locks of your head like purple,
  a king is caught in the flowing tresses.

This way of using metaphor will seem peculiar only if one insists upon imposing on the text the aesthetic of a later age. A prime instance of what I have called the misplaced concreteness of biblical research is that proponents of the theory of a fertility-cult liturgy have felt that the imagery of metallic ornament had to be explained as a reference to the statuette of a love goddess and the looming architectural imagery by an invoking of the allegedly supernatural character of the female addressed. This makes only a little more sense than to claim that when John Donne in "The Sunne Rising" writes, "She is all States, and all Princes, I, / Nothing else is," he must be addressing, by virtue of the global imagery, some cosmic goddess and not sweet Ann Donne.

Our passage begins without simile for the simple technical reason that the second verset of line I is used to address the woman who is the subject of the enraptured description. After this point, the second (or, for the triadic lines, the third) verset of each line is employed quite consistently to flaunt the metaphor by pushing its frame of reference into the foreground. The poet sets no limit on and aims for no unity in the semantic fields from which he draws his figures, moving rapidly from artisanry to agriculture to the animal kingdom to architecture, and concluding with dyed textiles. (In the analogous vertical description of the lover the imagery similarly wanders from doves bathing in watercourses and beds of spices to artifacts of gold, ivory, and marble, though the semantic field of artifact dominates as the celebration of the male body concentrates on the beautiful hardness of arms, thighs, and loins.) There is nevertheless a tactical advantage in beginning the description with perfectly curved ornaments and a rounded bowl or goblet, for the woman's beauty is so exquisite that the best analogue for it is the craft of the master artisan, an implicit third term of comparison being the poet's fine craft in so nicely matching image with object for each lovely aspect of this body.

That implied celebration of artifice may explain in part the flamboyant elaboration of the metaphors in all the concluding versets. It should be observed, however, that the function of these elaborations changes from line to line in accordance with both the body part invoked and the position of the line in the poem. In line 2, "the work of a master's hand" serves chiefly as an intensifier of the preceding simile of ornament and as a way of foregrounding the idea of artifice at the beginning of the series. In lines 3-5, as the description moves upward from feet and thighs to the central erogenous zone of vagina, belly, and breasts, the elaborations of the metaphor in the second versets are a way of being at once sexually explicit and decorous through elegant double entente. That is, we are meant to be continuously aware of the sexual details referred to, but it is the wittily deployed frame of reference of the metaphor that is kept in the foreground of our vision: we know the poet alludes to the physiology of lovemaking, but we "see" a curved bowl that never runs dry; the wheat-like belly bordered by a hedge of lilies is an ingenious superimposition of an agricultural image on an erotic one, since lilies elsewhere are implicitly associated with pubic hair; the bouncing, supple, symmetrical breasts are not just two fawns but also, in the focusing elaboration, a gazelle's perfectly matched twins.

The geographical specifications of the final versets in lines 6 and 7 have troubled many readers. It seems to me that here, when the poet has moved above the central sexual area of the body, he no longer is impelled to work out a cunning congruity between image and referent by way of double entente, and instead he can give free rein to the exuberance of figurative elaboration that in different ways has been perceptible in all the previous metaphors. If, as his eye moves to neck and face, the quality of grandeur rather than supple sexual allure is now uppermost, there is a poetic logic in the speaker's expanding these images of soaring architectural splendor and making the figurative frame of reference so prominent that we move from the dancing Shulamite to the public world of the gate at BatRabbim and the tower of Lebanon looking toward Damascus. As the lover's gaze moves up from the parts of the body usually covered and thus seen by him alone to the parts generally visible, it is appropriate that the similes for her beauty should be drawn now from the public realm. In a final turn, moreover, of the technique of last-verset elaboration, the triadic line 8 introduces an element of climactic surprise: the Shulamite's hair having been compared to brilliantly dyed wool or fabric, we discover that a king is caught, or bound, in the tresses (the Hebrew for this last term is a little doubtful, but since the root suggests running motion, the reference to flowing hair in context seems probable). This amounts to a strong elaboration of a relatively weak metaphor, and an elaboration that subsumes the entire series of images that has preceded: the powerful allure of sandaled feet, curving thighs, and all the rest that has pulsated through every choice of image now culminates in the hair, where at last the lover, through the self designation of king, introduces himself into the poem, quite literally interinvolves himself with the beloved ("a king is caught in the flowing tresses"). Up till now, she has been separate from him, dancing before his eager eye. Now, after a climactic line summarizing her beauty, he goes on to imagine embracing her and enjoying her (the climbing of the palm tree that I quoted earlier). It is a lovely illustration of how the exuberant metaphors carry the action forward.

Such obtrusions of metaphorical elaboration are allied with another distinctive mode of figuration of these poems, in which the boundaries between figure and referent, inside and outside, human body and accoutrement or natural setting, become suggestively fluid. Let me first cite three lines from the brief poem at the end of Chapter 1:

While the king was on his couch,
 my nard gave off its scent.
A sachet of myrrh is my lover to me,

  between my breasts he lodges.
A cluster of cypress is my lover to me,
  in the vineyards of Ein Gedi.

The first line is without figuration, the woman simply stating that she has scented her body for her lover. But the immediately following metaphoric representation of the lover as a sachet of myrrh—because he nestles between her breasts all night long—produces a delightful confusion between the literal nard with which she has perfumed herself and the figurative myrrh she cradles in her lover. Thus the act and actors of love become intertwined with the fragrant paraphernalia of love. The third line offers an alternative image of a bundle of aromatic herbs and then, in the second verset, one of those odd geographical specifications.… I have not followed the New JPS and Marvin Pope in translating the second verset as "from the vineyards," because it seems to me that the Hebrew has an ambiguity worth preserving. Presumably the metaphor is elaborated geographically because the luxuriant oasis at Ein Gedi was especially known for its trees and plants with aromatic leaves, and so the specification amounts to a heightening of the original assertion. At the same time the initial Hebrew particle be, which usually means "in," leaves a teasing margin for imagining that it is not the cypress cluster that comes from Ein Gedi but the fragrant embrace of the lovers that takes place in Ein Gedi. Though this second meaning is less likely, it is perfectly consistent with the syntax of the line, and the very possibility of this construal makes it hard to be sure where the metaphor stops and the human encounter it represents begins. There is, in other words, an odd and satisfying consonance in this teasing game of transformations between the pleasure of play with language through metaphor and the pleasure of love play that is the subject of the lines. That same consonance informs the beautiful poem that takes up all of Chapter 4, ending in the first verse of Chapter 5. It will provide an apt concluding illustration of the poetic art of the Song of Songs.

1 Oh, you are fair, my darling,
  oh, you are fair, your eyes are doves.
2 Behind your veil, your hair like a flock of
  goats
  streaming down Mount Gilead.
3 Your teeth are like a flock of ewes
  coming up from the bath,
4 Each one bearing twins,
  none bereft among them.
5 Like the scarlet thread your lips,
  your mouth is lovely.
6 Like a pomegranate-slice your brow
  behind your veil.
7 Like the tower of David your neck,
  built in rows.
8 A thousand shields are hung on it,
  all the heroes' bucklers.
9 Your two breasts are like two fawns,
  twins of the gazelle,
  browsing among the lilies.
10 Until day breathes
   and shadows flee
11 I'll betake me to the mount of myrrh
   and to the hill of frankincense.
12 You are all fair, my darling,
   there's no blemish in you.
13 With me from Lebanon, bride,
   with me from Lebanon, come!
14 Descend from Amana's peak,
   from the peak of Senir and Hermon,
15 From the dens of lions,
   from the mounts of panthers.
16 You ravish my heart, bride,
   you ravish my heart with one glance of
    your eyes,
   with one gem of your necklace.
17 How fair your love, my sister and bride,
   how much better your love than wine,
   and the scent of your ointments than any
    spice!
18 Nectar your lips drip, bride,
   honey and milk under your tongue,
   and the scent of your robes like Lebanon's scent.
19 A locked garden, my sister and
      bride,
   a locked pool, a sealed-up spring.
20 Your groove a grove of pomegranates
   with luscious fruit,
   cypress with nard.
21 Nard and saffron, cane and cinnamon,
   with all aromatic woods,
22 Myrrh and aloes,
   with all choice perfumes.
23 A garden spring,
   a well of fresh water,
   flowing from Lebanon.
24 Stir, north wind,
   come, south wind,
25 Breathe on my garden,
   let its spices flow.
26 "Let my lover come to his garden,
   and eat its luscious fruit."
27 I've come to my garden, my sister and bride,
   I've plucked my myrrh with my spice,
28 Eaten my honeycomb with my honey,
   drunk my wine with my milk.
29 "Eat, friends, and drink,
   be drunk with love."

As elsewhere in the Song of Songs, the poet draws his images from whatever semantic fields seem apt for the local figures—domesticated and wild animals, dyes, food, architecture, perfumes, and the floral world. Flamboyant elaboration of the metaphor, in which the metaphoric image takes over the foreground, governs the first third of the poem, culminating in the extravagant picture of the woman's neck as a tower hung with shields. The very repetition of ke ("like"), the particle of similitude, half a dozen times through these initial lines, calls attention to the activity of figurative comparison as it is being carried out. There is a certain witty ingenuity with which the elaborated metaphors are related to the body parts: twin-bearing, newly washed ewes to two perfect rows of white teeth and, perhaps, shields on the tower walls recalling the layered rows of a necklace.

What I should like to follow out more closely, however, is the wonderful transformations that the landscape of fragrant mountains and gardens undergoes from line 11 to the end of the poem. The first mountain and hill—rarely has a formulaic word-pair been used so suggestively—in line 11 are metaphorical, referring to the body of the beloved or, perhaps, as some have proposed, more specifically to the mons veneris. It is interesting that the use of two nouns in the construct state to form a metaphor ("mount of myrrh," "hill of frankincense") is quite rare elsewhere in biblical poetry, though it will become a standard procedure in post-biblical Hebrew poetry. The naturalness with which the poet adopts that device here reflects how readily objects in the Song of Songs are changed into metaphors. The Hebrew for "frankincense" is levonah, which sets up an intriguing faux raccord with "Lebanon," levanon, two lines down. From the body as landscape—an identification already adumbrated in the comparison of hair to flocks coming down from the mountain and teeth to ewes coming up from the washing—the poem moves to an actual landscape with real rather than figurative promontories. If domesticated or in any case gentle animals populate the metaphorical landscape at the beginning, there is a new note of danger or excitement in the allusion to the lairs of panthers and lions on the real northern mountainside. The repeated verb "ravish" in line 16, apparently derived from lev, "heart," picks up in its sound (libavtini) the interecho of levonah and levanon and so triangulates the body-as-landscape, the external landscape, and the passion the beloved inspires.

The last thirteen lines of the poem, as the speaker moves toward the consummation of love intimated in lines 26-29, reflect much more of an orchestration of the semantic fields of the metaphors: fruit, honey, milk, wine, and, in consonance with the sweet fluidity of this list of edibles, a spring of fresh flowing water and all the conceivable spices that could grow in a well-irrigated garden. Lebanon, which as we have seen has already played an important role in threading back and forth between the literal and figurative landscapes, continues to serve as a unifier. The scent of the beloved's robes is like Lebanon's scent, no doubt because Lebanon is a place where aromatic trees grow, but also with the suggestion, again fusing figurative with literal, that the scent of Lebanon clings to her dress because she has just returned from there. "All aromatic woods" in line 21 is literally in the Hebrew "all the trees of levonah," and the echo of levonah-levanon is carried forward two lines later when the locked spring in the garden wells up with flowing water (nozlim, an untranslatable poetic synonym for water) from Lebanon—whether because Lebanon, with its mountain streams, is the superlative locus of fresh running water, or because one is to suppose some mysterious subterranean feed-in from the waters of wild and mountainous Lebanon to this cultivated garden. In either case, there is a suggestive crossover back from the actual landscape to a metaphorical one. The garden at the end that the lover enters—and to "come to" or "enter" often has a technical sexual meaning in biblical Hebrew—is the body of the beloved, and one is not hard put to see the physiological fact alluded to in the fragrant flowing of line 25 (the same root as nozlim in line 23) that precedes the enjoyment of luscious fruit.

What I have just said, however, catches only one side of a restless dialectic movement of signification and as such darkens the delicately nuanced beauty of the poem with the shadow of reductionism. For though we know, and surely the original audience was intended to know, that the last half of the poem conjures up a delectable scene of love's consummation, this garden of aromatic plants, wafted by the gentle winds, watered by a hidden spring, is in its own right an alluring presence to the imagination before and after any decoding into a detailed set of sexual allusions. The poetry by the end becomes a kind of self-transcendence of double entente: the beloved's body is, in a sense, "represented" as a garden, but it also turns into a real garden, magically continuous with the mountain landscape so aptly introduced at the midpoint of the poem.

It is hardly surprising that only here in biblical poetry do we encounter such enchanting interfusions between the literal and metaphorical realms, because only here is the exuberant gratification of love through all five senses the subject. Prevalent preconceptions about the Hebrew Bible lead us to think of it as a collection of writings rather grimly committed to the notions of covenant, law, solemn obligation, and thus the very antithesis of the idea of play. There is more than a grain of truth in such preconceptions (one can scarcely imagine a Hebrew Aristophanes or a Hebrew Odyssey), but the literary art of the Bible, in both prose narrative and poetry, reflects many more elements of playfulness than might meet the casual eye. Only in the Song of Songs, however, is the writer's art directed to the imaginative realization of a world of uninhibited self-delighting play, without moral conflict, without the urgent context of history and nationhood and destiny, without the looming perspectives of a theological world-view. Poetic language and, in particular, its most characteristic procedure, figuration, are manipulated as pleasurable substance: metaphor transforms the body into spices and perfumes, wine and luscious fruit, all of which figurative images blur into the actual setting in which the lovers enact their love, a natural setting replete with just those delectable things. There is a harmonious correspondence between poem and world, the world exhibiting the lovely tracery of satisfying linkages that characterizes poetry itself. In the fluctuating movement from literal to figurative and back again, both sides of the dialectic are enhanced: the inventions of the poetic medium become potently suffused with the gratifying associations of the erotic, and erotic longing and fulfillment are graced with the elegant aesthetic form of a refined poetic art.