Song of Solomon 4
The Lover describes the Beloved's body part by part — eyes, hair, teeth, lips, neck, breasts — then calls her his locked garden, his sealed fountain.
Summary
Chapter 4 opens with the Lover's direct address — behold, thou art fair, my love — and launches immediately into the wasf. Thine eyes are as doves behind thy veil; thy hair is as a flock of goats that appear from mount Gilead. Thy teeth are like a flock of newly shorn ewes, whereof every one hath twins, and none is bereaved among them. Thy lips are like a thread of scarlet, and thy speech is comely; thy temples are like a piece of pomegranate within thy locks. Thy neck is like the tower of David, builded for an armoury, whereon there hang a thousand shields, all the shields of the mighty men. The wasf continues through her breasts (two young roes that are twins, which feed among the lilies) and then shifts into invitation: the Lover calls her to come away from Lebanon, from the mountain of leopards — an image of wildness and distance that functions as the external world from which the lovers must depart to be together.
The second half of the chapter introduces the garden, the book's central recurring image. A garden enclosed is my sister, my bride; a spring shut up, a fountain sealed. The garden belongs to the Beloved — it is her body, her presence, the space of their love — and it is both enclosed and, the Lover's praise implies, ready to be opened for him. He describes its contents: pomegranates, camphire, spikenard, saffron, calamus, cinnamon, frankincense, myrrh, aloes, with all chief spices — a catalog of the most exotic and expensive aromatic materials available in the ancient Near Eastern world. He calls on the north wind and the south wind to blow upon the garden and send its spices out. Then the Beloved speaks the invitation that closes the chapter: let my beloved come into his garden and eat his pleasant fruits. The movement of invitation — the Lover describes the garden, the Beloved opens it — is the chapter's principal erotic structure.
- 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.