Song of Solomon 5
The Lover comes to his garden and then is gone; the Beloved searches the city again and this time the watchmen beat her; she describes the Lover's body to the daughters of Jerusalem.
Summary
Chapter 5 opens with a single verse from the Lover — I am come into my garden, my sister, my spouse; I have gathered my myrrh with my spice; I have eaten my honeycomb with my honey; I have drunk my wine with my milk — which most commentators read as the consummation narrated briefly and immediately closed. The editorial voice (or possibly the daughters of Jerusalem) responds: eat, O friends; drink, yea, drink abundantly, O beloved. Then the second dream sequence begins. The Beloved is asleep but her heart is awake; the Lover knocks at the door: open to me, my sister, my love, for my head is filled with dew and my locks with the drops of the night. She hesitates — she has taken off her coat, how shall she put it on; she has washed her feet, how shall she defile them? The Lover puts his hand through the latch-opening. Her heart is moved, she rises to open, she finds myrrh on the handles of the lock. She opens, but the Lover has withdrawn.
The Beloved goes into the city to search, as she did in chapter 3, but this time the outcome is different. The watchmen who go about the city find her, smite her, wound her, take away her veil. She charges the daughters of Jerusalem to tell her beloved that she is sick with love if they find him. The daughters ask: what is thy beloved more than another beloved? She answers with the Beloved's wasf — the book's only extended female description of a male body. My beloved is white and ruddy, the chiefest among ten thousand. His head is as the most fine gold; his locks are bushy and black as a raven; his eyes are as doves by rivers of water; his cheeks are as a bed of spices. His lips like lilies, dropping sweet-smelling myrrh; his hands are as gold rings set with beryl; his belly is as bright ivory overlaid with sapphires; his legs are as pillars of marble, set upon sockets of fine gold. His mouth is most sweet; yea, he is altogether lovely. This is my beloved and this is my friend, O daughters of Jerusalem. The wasf is the chapter's structural and rhetorical centrepiece, the Beloved's answer to the Lover's four wasf passages in the book.
- 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.