Song of Solomon 2
The Lover leaps across the mountains like a gazelle; the Beloved watches him come to her window and then hears him call her away.
Summary
Chapter 2 begins with the Beloved's self-comparison — I am the rose of Sharon, and the lily of the valleys — which the Lover immediately mirrors and extends: as a lily among thorns, so is my love among the daughters. The chapter's central movement is the Lover's arrival. He comes leaping upon the mountains, skipping upon the hills, like a roe or a young hart. He stands behind the Beloved's wall, looking through the windows, peering through the lattice, and calls her to rise and come away. His invitation is one of the Bible's great set-pieces of seasonal description: the winter is past, the rain is over and gone, the flowers appear on the earth, the fig tree putteth forth her green figs, the vines with the tender grape give a good smell. He asks her to show him her face, let him hear her voice, for her voice is sweet and her countenance comely.
The chapter closes on two important structural elements. The first is the Beloved's affirmation of mutual possession — my beloved is mine and I am his — one of the book's key formulas of reciprocal love, which returns in 6:3 and 7:10 with slight variations that scholars have read as a subtle movement from possessiveness toward surrender. The second is the first occurrence of the threefold refrain: I charge you, O daughters of Jerusalem, by the roes and by the hinds of the field, that ye stir not up nor awaken my love until he please. This refrain (repeated at 3:5 and 8:4 in close variants) is the book's structural marker, used to close a lyrical unit and hand control back to the reader's attention. The natural imagery throughout — gazelle, roe, turtledove, figs, vines — is the Song's characteristic register: the lovers speak of each other through the created world, and the created world is always bursting into spring in their presence.
- 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.