The poet’s description of the Shunamite beauty in Song of Solomon is breathtaking. Meticulously, he employs his craft from her head to her toe, painting a portrait of her body that sets a reader back on his heels.
Your rounded thighs are like jewels,
the work of a master hand.
It is understandable that pious minds should so quickly have had recourse to allegory, for it is convenient—though in a way, quite sad—to look away from this fresh, fleshly enchantment of a man for his beloved woman and to focus instead on YHWH’s love for Israel or Christ’s for his church. Such symbolic reframing of love’s rushing words goes back to our earliest post-biblical interpretative works.
It is not a bad reflex, actually, for those more celestial loves surely bear some relationship to the worldly, immediate passion of Solomon’s Song. Yet one ought not lose the simple, high-pulsed ardor of the Song’s contemplation of this marvel of creation, this well-curved beauty, this woman.
Canter Bridge 
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