Song of Solomon 1
The book opens on a woman's voice, imperious and unembarrassed, requesting the kisses of her lover's mouth.
Summary
Chapter 1 opens the Song of Solomon with the Beloved's voice in mid-desire: let him kiss me with the kisses of his mouth, for thy love is better than wine. She addresses the daughters of Jerusalem directly, explaining that she is dark-skinned — dark as the tents of Kedar, lovely as the curtains of Solomon — because her mother's sons set her to keep the vineyards, and the sun darkened her. She asks where the Lover feeds his flock at noon so she need not wander among the flocks of his companions. The daughters of Jerusalem answer with directions, and the Lover himself speaks for the first time, comparing the Beloved to a mare among Pharaoh's chariots, to a cluster of henna blossoms in the vineyards of En-gedi. The chapter ends with an exchange of mutual praise — the Beloved declaring their couch green, the Lover comparing her eyes to doves — the first of the Song's many wasf-like exchanges of description.
The chapter's primary literary achievement is the establishment of the book's formal structure. Three voices are introduced: the Beloved (who speaks first and most), the Lover (who answers her), and the daughters of Jerusalem (who observe, receive, and occasionally respond). The social tension that runs through the whole book is introduced here: the Beloved is working-class, sun-darkened, set to labor by her brothers; the daughters of Jerusalem are city women whose whiteness implies they do not work in the fields. Her insistence that she is both dark and beautiful — the copula is contested; most modern translations read 'dark and beautiful' rather than 'dark but beautiful' — is the book's first assertion that desire does not wait for social approval. The allegorical tradition (Jewish and Christian alike) has found in her dark beauty a figure for Israel's or the soul's unworthiness before the divine beloved, with the darkness reread as the mark of suffering and the beauty as what God sees through and beyond it.
- Song of Solomon 1Chapter 1 is the Song's opening statement of desire.
- Song of Solomon 2Chapter 2 is the book's most famous sequence of natural imagery and contains the lines most associated with the Song in popular memory — I am the rose of Sharon, and the lily of the valleys.
- Song of Solomon 3Chapter 3 contains two of the book's most structurally important passages: the first of the two dream sequences (3:1-5) and the description of Solomon's wedding litter (3:6-11).
- Song of Solomon 4Chapter 4 is the first and most extended of the Lover's wasf praise poems — a form with close parallels in classical Arabic love poetry (wasf meaning 'description'), in which the body of the beloved is described part by part from head downward, using a sequence of metaphors from nature, architecture, and precious materials.
- Song of Solomon 5Chapter 5 is the Song's most dramatically concentrated chapter and contains both the second dream sequence and the Beloved's own wasf — her description of the Lover's body.
- Song of Solomon 6Chapter 6 is the briefest of the book's concentrated central chapters and turns on a structural pivot: the daughters of Jerusalem, who have been the passive audience of the Beloved's declarations, now ask a genuine question — whither is thy beloved gone? — and receive an answer that clarifies the garden as both literal meeting-place and something closer to the Beloved's interior life: my beloved is gone down to his garden, to the beds of spices, to feed in the gardens and to gather lilies.
- Song of Solomon 7Chapter 7 contains the fourth and most structurally unusual of the book's wasf passages — the only one that begins with the feet and moves upward, and the only one framed as a performance for an audience (return, return, O Shulamite, that we may look upon thee).
- Song of Solomon 8Chapter 8 is the Song's ending and contains its most famous lines and its most compressed theology of love.