A Garden and a Spring

There is a short song that is not like any other. It has no laws in it and no battles and no kings going to war. It is called the Song of Songs, which means the best song there is, and it is Solomon’s. It is a wedding song. Two young people sing it to each other, back and forth, the way two people talk when they are glad of each other and do not much care who hears. Sometimes the women of Jerusalem sing an answer, like a crowd at a wedding calling out.

The girl sings first. She has been working outside in the sun, and she knows it, and she says so before anybody else can. “I am dark, and I am beautiful, daughters of Jerusalem — dark as the tents of Kedar, beautiful as Solomon’s curtains. Do not stare at me because the sun has looked at me. My mother’s sons were angry with me and made me look after their vineyards, and my own vineyard I did not look after at all.” Then she asks the only question she really wants an answer to: “Tell me, you whom I love — where do you feed your flock? Where do you let it lie down at noon?”

He answers her, and after that the two of them hardly stop. “Look at you. You are beautiful, my companion. Your eyes are doves.” “And you are handsome, and truly lovely. The beams of our house are cedar and the ceiling is cypress, and there are leaves over our bed.” “I am only a flower of the flat country, a lily out of the valleys.” “A lily among thorns — that is what you are, next to all the others.” “And you are an apple tree among the trees of the wood. I wanted to sit down in your shade, and the fruit of it was sweet in my mouth.”

Then she hears him a long way off and knows the sound of him. “The voice of my love! Look — he is coming, jumping over the mountains, skipping over the hills. My love is like a gazelle, like a young deer. Look, he is standing behind our wall already, looking in at the windows, peering through the lattice.” And he calls her out of the house. “Get up, my companion, my beautiful one, my dove, and come away. Look — the winter is over. The rain is finished and gone. The flowers have come out on the ground. It is time to cut the vines, and the voice of the turtledove has been heard in our country. The fig tree has put out its first little figs, and the vines in flower are giving off their smell. Get up, my beautiful one, and come away.” “Come, my dove, into the shelter in the rock, in the cleft by the outer wall. Let me see your face and let me hear your voice, because your voice is sweet and your face is lovely.” And then, in the middle of it, something about the vineyard: “Catch the foxes for us — the little foxes that are spoiling the vineyards. Our vines are in bloom.” “My love is mine, and I am his; he pastures his flock among the lilies.”

He sings a long song about her, going over her one piece at a time the way you might tell somebody about a country you have been to. Her eyes are doves. Her hair is like a flock of goats coming down the hills of Gilead. Her teeth are like sheep just washed, every one of them matched. Her lips are a scarlet thread and her cheek is a slice of pomegranate. Her neck, he says, is like David’s tower with a thousand shields hanging on it — which is a strange thing to say to a girl, but he means she carries herself like something that cannot be knocked over. Then he stops going one piece at a time. “You are altogether beautiful, my companion. There is no fault in you at all.”

Then he gives her a name. “You are a garden with a gate shut, my sister, my bride. A garden shut, a spring sealed up. What grows in you is an orchard — pomegranates with the best fruit on them, henna and nard, nard and saffron, sweet cane and cinnamon, every kind of tree from Lebanon, myrrh and aloes and all the finest spices. You are a garden spring, a well of living water running down out of Lebanon.” A garden with a wall round it, and a spring nobody else drinks from. Her own, and given to him, and to nobody else in the world. And she does not tell him to stay outside it. She calls the wind to come and blow the smell of it across to him: “Wake up, north wind. Come, south wind. Blow on my garden and let its spices run. Let my love come into his garden and eat its best fruit.”

She loses him one night and goes out through the streets of the city looking for him and asks the watchmen if they have seen him. A wedding procession comes up out of the desert like a column of smoke, with Solomon’s own carriage in it and sixty soldiers walking round it with their swords on. And there are more songs of the same kind, about a palm tree and a garden of nuts and going out to the fields to see whether the vines are in bud.

Then the women of Jerusalem see two figures a long way off, coming up the road. “Who is this coming up, dressed in white, leaning on the one she loves?” She wants to be fastened on to him and not come off. “Put me like a seal on your heart, like a seal on your arm — because love is as strong as death, and its jealousy is as hard as the grave. Its wings are wings of fire.” “Great waters cannot put love out. Rivers cannot drown it. If a man offered everything he owned in his house to buy love, people would only laugh at him.”

Her brothers had worried about her, back when she was small. They had talked it over the way brothers do, out loud, in front of her. “We have a little sister, and she is not grown yet. What will we do for our sister on the day somebody comes asking for her? If she is a wall, we will build silver on top of her. If she is a door, we will board her up with cedar.” She heard them. And she answers them now, when she is grown and standing beside the man she chose. “I am a wall. And in his eyes I have become one who has found peace.”

She has one more thing to say, about the vineyard nobody ever let her keep. Solomon had a vineyard once, she says, and he rented it out to keepers, and each of them had to bring him a thousand pieces of silver for the fruit of it. “You can keep your thousand, Solomon. My vineyard is my own, and it is right here in front of me.” And at the end the two of them are calling to each other across the hills again. “You who sit in the gardens — my companions are listening for your voice. Let me hear it.” “Hurry, my love. Be like a gazelle, like a young deer, on the mountains of spices.”

No rules, no war, nobody being punished. Just two people who are glad of each other, singing about a garden and a spring and the winter being over — and one line, in the middle of the gladness, that says love is as strong as death.