There’s a song going round. Maybe you’ve heard it. It’s a duet that starts simply enough. A woman is talking to her friends about her lover—how she longs to smell him, touch him, kiss him. All the girls are after him, she tells her friends, but she will be the one to seduce him.
The male-half of the duet enters the song. He responds to the woman’s breathy words with compliments all his own. He comments on her earrings and jewellery, then seductively describes her body. He begins with her eyes, her lips, her hair. Then he describes the beauty of her feet, the magic of her legs, how attracted he is to her waist and navel—and how crazy he is about her breasts.
‘How beautiful you are,’ he sings. ‘How handsome you are, my lover!’ she responds. They talk about making love in the forest. She talks about sneaking him into her mother’s bedroom at night. ‘Come away, my lover,’ the woman sings as the song ends and she leads him off to another moment of passion.
Desire, eroticism, infatuation—standard fair on music charts and Video Hits. You could imagine Missy Elliot and Eminem singing this one. But the seductive song you’ve just heard about is not in high-rotation on your teenager’s iPod. These are lyrics, in fact, lifted from one of antiquity’s greatest love poems. It’s not sung by any cleavage-shaking diva or smarmy soul man, but by a husband and wife. And while it’s possibly three-thousand years old, it’s a song for our times. It is the song of the great romantic book of the Bible—the Song of Songs.
Popularly called the Song of Solomon, this poem is a celebration of the wild, sensuous, spontaneous and abiding love of marital devotion. The couple involved—the lover and his beloved—are not simply in a sexual relationship; they’re in a romance. The lover lavishes on his bride a barrage of praise for her beauty, describing her eyes as doves, her lips like scarlet ribbon, and her waist like ‘a mound of wheat, encircled by lilies’! (Try that one fellas!) But what woman wouldn’t want to be told, ‘Your hair is like royal tapestry; the king is held captive by it…,’ or, ‘Turn your eyes from me; they overwhelm me’?
The beloved gives as good as she gets. ‘My lover is radiant and ruddy, outstanding among ten thousand,’ she says of him, ‘his hair is wavy… his arms are rods of gold… his legs are pillars of marble… his mouth is sweetness itself…’ The beloved affirms her lovers’ looks, abilities, and strength. What man doesn’t long for the respect and admiration of his woman?
There’s a verse in the Song that says, ‘You are a garden locked up… my bride; you are a spring enclosed, a sealed fountain.’ A locked garden, a sealed fountain—don’t miss the poetry here. Long before there is Eros in this relationship there is Chastity. Virginity isn’t mocked, ridiculed, or the cause of embarrassment in the Song. Rather, it’s admired and applauded, something to be proud of, the delivery of an untouched smorgasbord to the lover when the appointed time has come. And when that appointed time does arrive, the couple feast…
‘Come, my lover, let us go to the countryside,’ another verse says, ‘…there I will give you my love.’ The lover and his bride have no reservations about intimacy. They enjoy each other’s bodies. There’s no inhibition. Whether in the palace chambers, within the privacy of a deep forest, or even under an apple tree, they feast on their love. In their love making freedom, adventure and attentiveness intertwine.
There’s a recurring refrain in the Song of Solomon; it’s a piece of advice the beloved gives her friends, and it goes like this: ‘Daughters of Jerusalem, I charge you: do not arouse or awaken love until it so desires.’ This deepest and truest love is to be treated with the highest value. It’s not to be prematurely awakened or artificially stimulated. It’s not to be plastered on billboards or sold on magazine stands. This isn’t the kind of love portrayed in Cleo, Cosmo, Maxim or Ralph. There’s no price high enough to buy this kind of love. In fact, love that’s offered for sale is by nature a cheap imitation or complete counterfeit.
Precious. Exclusive. Spontaneous. Erotic. Sensuous. Abiding. Chaste. The Song of Solomon is a vision of love unequalled in beauty and unrivalled in thrill, which takes all of thirty minutes to read. Let’s read it, embrace it, unleash it. Let our ministers preach it and our painters depict it, let our teenagers study it and our couples ponder it leisurely. Because the Song is a vision that exposes the love on our screens, pages and stages for the hollow imitations they are; the Song is a vision that can prepare the teenager for a pure but thrilling love that will awaken in its own time, and the Song is a vision that can breath new imagination into a marriage that’s grown weary.
