Canter Bridge

It must be asked what a work like this Song says of the community that embraces it and of that people’s God. A splendid eroticism pervades its lines, eroding the conventions of pious discourse in its exuberant longing for intercourse. There is no voyeurism here, it is true. But the appreciation of a splendid and holy eroticism is blushworthy for readers who have been patiently weaned from such desire and its out-loud articulation.

I am my lover’s and he is mine.

So does the Shulamite erase all inhibition in her quest for her lover’s embrace. She imagines him a king, as countless other lovers have done. She takes up the language of hide-and-seek, of questing after the most handsome man her words can conjur, of an entire city’s guardians caught up in the drama of her love.

She needs him, as lovers do. The alleys and streets of her ardent pursuit become mere stage props to the central plot: she must find him, must have him, must greet the morning with him in love’s garden.

If we live in a moment besotted by eroticism of a less splendid kind, it is also true that the legacy of most Bible readers makes us shuffle unquietly before the careless flamboyance of the Shulamite’s longing for her Solomon. We wish the covenantal bounds of such love were more clearly drawn. We nose about for some conventional paradigm in which to guard her ardor from misinterpretation. We wonder what people will think.

The Shulamite does not. She wants merely to get her hands on this man, almost as though Providence had made them both for such a moment. The Song’s precariously enduring place in the biblical anthology ventures a guess: perhaps it has.