SPICES
Table of Contents
The beautiful poem
that takes up all of Chapter 4, ending in the first verse of Chapter 5
provides an apt illustration of the poetic art of The Song of Songs.
I will look closely in this article at the wonderful transformations that
the landscape of fragrant mountains and gardens undergoes from line 11
to the end of the poem. The first mountain and hill in line 11 are metaphorical,
referring to the body of the beloved or, perhaps, as some have proposed,
more specifically to the mons veneris.
It is interesting that the use of two nouns in the construct state to
form a metaphor (mountain of myrrh, hill of frankincense)
is quite rare elsewhere in biblical poetry, though it will be come a standard
procedure in postbiblical Hebrew poetry. The natural manner with which
the poet adopts that device here reflects how readily objects in the Song
of Songs are changed into metaphors. The Hebrew for frankincense
is levonah, which sets up an intriguing faux raccord with
Lebanon, levanon, two lines down. From the body as
landscape an identification already adumbrated
in the comparison of hair to flocks coming down from the mountain and
teeth to ewes coming up from the washing the poem moves to an actual
landscape with real rather than figurative promontories.
If
domesticated or in any case gentle animals populate the metaphorical landscape
at the beginning, there is a new note of danger or excitement in the allusion
to the lairs of panthers and lions on the real northern mountainside.
The repeated verb ravish in line 16, apparently derived from
lev, heart, picks up in its sound (libavtini)
the inter-echo of levonah (frankincense) and levanon (Lebanon),
and so triangulates the body-as-landscape, the external landscape, and
the passion the beloved inspires.
The last thirteen
lines of the poem, as the speaker moves toward the consummation of love
intimated in lines 26-29, reflect much more of an orchestration of the
semantic fields of the metaphors: fruit, honey, milk, wine, and, in consonance
with the sweet fluidity of this list of edibles, a spring of fresh flowing
water and all the conceivable spices that could grow in a well irrigated
garden. Lebanon, which as we have seen has already played an important
role in threading back and forth between the literal and figurative landscapes,
continues to serve as a unifier.
The scent
of the beloveds robes is like Lebanons scent (line 18), no
doubt because Lebanon is a place where aromatic trees grow, but also with
the suggestion (again fusing figurative with literal) that the scent of
Lebanon clings to her dress because she has just returned from there (lines
13-15). All aromatic woods in line 21 is literally in the
Hebrew all the trees of levonah, and the echo of levonah-levanon
is carried forward two lines later when the locked spring in the garden
wells up with flowing water (nozlim, an untranslatable poetic synonym
for water) from the mountain streams of Lebanon.
There
is a suggestive crossover back from the actual landscape to a metaphorical
one. The garden at the end that the lover enters and to come
to or enter often has a technical sexual meaning in
biblical Hebrew is the body of the beloved; one is not hard put
to see the physiological fact alluded to in the fragrant flowing of line
25 (the same root as nozlim in line 23) that precedes the enjoyment of
luscious fruit.
Although we know, and surely the original audience was intended to know,
that the last half of the poem conjures up a delectable scene of loves
consummation, this garden of aromatic plants, wafted by the gentle winds,
watered by a hidden spring, is in its own right an alluring presence to
the imagination (before and after any decoding into a detailed set of
sexual allusions). The poetry by the end becomes a kind of self-transcendence
of double meaning: the beloveds body is, in a sense, represented
as a garden, but it also turns into a real garden, magically continuous
with the mountain landscape so aptly introduced at the midpoint of the
poem.
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From:
The Art of Biblical Poetry by Robert Alter (Basic Books,
1985). Reprinted by permission of the author. |
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Robert
Alter is professor of Hebrew and Comparative literature at the
University of California at Berkeley. He has written broadly on
biblical and modern Hebrew literature. |
SPICES
Table of Contents
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