Rise Up, My Love

The Song of Songs is a book of mouths. A woman speaks more than a man. They praise one another’s bodies with a frankness that later centuries would either baptize or lock away. Myrrh, spikenard, a bed of green, a wall, a little fox, a watchman who strikes. The poem knows streets and it knows gardens. It does not apologize for wanting.

Tradition gave the book to Solomon. Scholarship, more cautiously, hears a later Hebrew, Persian or Hellenistic centuries are often proposed, and a collection rather than a single night. The argument about date is real. It does not decide whether the desire is real. Ahavah is the word: love, in a grammar that can mean God and can mean a mouth on a mouth.

Jewish reading has heard Israel and God, the Shekhinah, the drama of covenant as courtship and quarrel. Christian reading has heard Christ and the Church, or the soul. These allegories are old, serious, and still living. They are interpretations. They are not a sponge. If the allegory were the only truth, the poem would not have needed breasts, lilies, and the hour when the voice says come away.

The King James line that English cannot seem to put down is not a thesis. It is an invitation, and it has weather in it: “Rise up, my love, my fair one, and come away.” Winter past, rain over and gone, the next verses, if you stay. The command is not seizure. It is the open of a door. Whether anyone walks through is the poem’s remaining heat.

Do not baptize the Song as only allegory. Do not strip it as only erotica. The canon kept a desire it could not fully moralize, and the desire kept a holiness it could not fully undress. That double keeping is the fact. The rest is how a community dares to read.