Cantares 4

Song of Solomon 4 is the sound of a man looking at the woman he is about to marry and trying to say what he sees. He starts with her eyes, doves behind a veil, and works down, and his comparisons come from the world he knows: her hair moves like a flock of black goats pouring down a hillside, her teeth are white as sheep just out of the wash and every one has its twin, her lips are a scarlet thread, her neck rises like David's tower with its rows of shields. Then he stops and says the whole of it in one line: you are altogether beautiful, my darling, and there is no flaw in you. From that point the poem changes register. He calls her down from the dangerous mountains of the north, from the dens of lions, to come with him, and for the first time he calls her his bride. One look from her eyes has taken his heart. Her love is better than wine, her lips drip honey, her clothes smell like the cedar forests of Lebanon. She is a garden, he says, but a garden locked, a spring sealed, and inside it grow pomegranates and henna, nard and saffron, cinnamon and myrrh and every spice a merchant could carry from the ends of the earth. The chapter has been the bridegroom's all the way through, and then, in its last verse, she speaks. Let the north wind and the south wind blow through my garden, she says, and let my beloved come into it and taste its fruit. Christians have long heard the church answering Christ in that invitation; the poem itself is content to be a wedding.