Au In the beginning was the Word
 

1. – The Song of Songs is the best of the songs. It has been attributed to Solomon, but the author could be another one. There are parallels in old Egyptian songs. In the Jamnia Jewish synod (at the end of the first century a. D.) the Song sanctity was discussed. Rabi Akiba set the question saying: “Nobody in Israel has questioned it, as if it stained the hands”, “all sacred writings are saint, but the Song is sacrosanct”. Christian tradition has assumed it as inspired.

2. – The Song has received for centuries an allegoric interpretation, spiritual. It was devoted to the relationship between God and his people. It is said in the Bible: “I shall marry you for ever” (Os 2, 21). It was devoted to Christ, who becomes “one flesh” with the Church: “This is a very great mystery, says Paul, and I refer to Christ and the Church”.  (Eph 5, 32). “Only the bridegroom has the bride”, affirms John the Baptist (Jn 3, 29). In the wedding at Canaan Jesus begins his signals (Jn 2, 11). The Revelation celebrates “the wedding of the lamb” (Rev 19, 7). Depending on the cases, the bridegroom is Mary, the humanity, the soul.

3. – Saint John of the Cross Spiritual song are “songs between the soul and the bride”: “The order of these songs, he says, is from when a soul begins to serve God until it reaches the last stage of perfection, which is the spiritual marriage”. And also: “Is better to leave the sayings of love in their full broadness so that each one of them takes advantage of its own way and spiritual wealth, that to abbreviate it to a sense to which not all palate accommodates”. The Song’s poetry seems insuperable. Many strophes were composed by fray John in the jail of Toledo, between December 1577 and august 1578. He was 35 years old. “Being in jail and beginning to sing that song: “Where did you hide, Love” he thought that God had spoken to him and He had told him: “Here I am with you. I shall liberate you of any evil”. This comforted him so much that “he thought he was in the glory”. The eve of his death, the prior of the convent began to read him the recommendation of the soul, but fray John told him: “Tell me, father, about the Songs, that the other thing is not necessary”. The Song was not published in Madrid until 1630.

4. – Many are those who give to the Song a literal interpretation. In this sense, the Song celebrates human love such as God wants it between man and woman: “So God created man in his image; in the image of God he created him; male ad female he created them” (Gn 1, 27). It is an absurd to believe that God has nothing to do with human love: “It burns like a blazing fire, it blazes like a mighty fire” (Song 8, 6). God´s original project is to make husband and wife “only one flesh” (Gn 2, 24) The Song has a religious and wisdom background, able to delight the youngsters: “Behind your footstep / the youngsters follow the path / at the chime of the flashlight / the pickled wine / divine balsam emissions” (Spiritual song, 25; second draft, Jaen codex).

5. – Obviously, the Song is a whole of love’s poems. It songs something that exceeds, “the way of the man in the maiden” (Pr 30, 19) or, even better, the way of both, the vicissitudes of their love: the desire, the attraction, the look, the figure, the difficulties, the search, meetings and failures to meet, questions and doubts, secret cites, wedding, union, consent, fidelity. She is the Shulammite (Song 7, 1), perhaps from the Palestine city of Sunem, today Solem. And he? It is not well known: a shepherd (1, 7), a king (7, 6), Solomon (3, 7-11). The poems are presented without an evident order. Let´s see some sequences, establishing a comparison with the Spiritual song, inspired in the Song. The Spiritual song verses order was completely changed. Here we cite them following the Jaen´s codex order

6. – The desire, the attraction: “Shower me with kisses of your mouth! Your love is more delicious than wine, your fragrance is better that any perfume, your name spreads out like an ointment, no wonder the maidens love you madly. Lure me to you, let us hurry” (1, 2-3). And also: “If only you were my brother, nursed at my mother’s breasts. I could kiss you outside if we met, without anyone despising me for it. I would lead you and bring you into the house of my mother, and you would teach me there. I would give you wine with spice and the juice of my pomegranates” (8, 1-2)

7. – In the Spiritual Song: “Oh crystal clear water / if on those your silver cheeks / suddenly you would form / the desired eyes / that in my entrails I have drawn!” (12), “much charm lavishing / she went through those groves in a hurry / and, by looking at them, with her figure only / dressed up she left them with her beauty” (5). “And all those wandering / keep telling me your great charm / and all of them further wound me / and leave me dying / something I do not know they keep stammering” (7)

8. – The look, the figure: “You are beautiful, my love, how beautiful you are! Your eyes are doves… Before the dawn breaks and shadows flee, I will hasten to the mountain of myrrh, to the hill of frankincense. You are wholly beautiful, my love, perfect and unblemished! Come from Lebanon, my bride… You have ravished my heart, my sister, with one of your glances” (4, 1-9), “your neck is an ivory tower… your crowned hair is royal purple, which holds a king captive int its tresses” (7, 5-6).

9. – In the Spiritual Song: “When you looked at me / your charm in my eyes impressed / that is why you softened me / and so deserved / my eyes to adore what they in you were seeing” (32), “in only that hair / that in my neck you thought of flying / you looked at it in my neck / and as in jail you were already, / and in one of my eyes you were wounded” (31), “uncover your presence, / and kill me your sight and beauty. / Look that the pain / of love, does not heal / but only with the presence and the figure” (11).

10. – Difficulties, family opposition: “I am sunburned yet lovely, O daughters of Jerusalem… Stare not at my dark complexion, it is the sun that has darkened me. My mother’s sons were angry with me and made me work in their vineyards, so I failed to tend my own!. Tell me, my soul´s beloved, where you graze your flock, where you rest your sheep at noon. Why must I wander lie a veiled woman beside the flocks of your companions?” A track: “Id you do not know, most beautiful woman, follow the tracks of the flock and pasture your young goats beside the shepherd’s tents” (1, 5-8). In some sense, the sweetheart is inaccessible: “You are a garden enclosed, my sister, my bride”, “sealed fountain” (4, 12).

11. – In the Spiritual Song: “Not be willing to despise me, / that, if a dark colour you found on me / you may well look at me / after you looked at me / since charm and beauty you left on me” (33), “looking for my romances I will go through those mountains and riversides, / I neither will take flowers / nor I will be afraid of the wild beasts / and I will go through forts and frontiers” (3), “shepherds whoever you were / there through the sheep pens to the low hill, / if by chance you see / to that who I most love, / tell him that I suffer, I grieve and I die” (2), “oh woods and thickets / planted by my sweetheart’s hand! / oh fields of vegetables / of flowers enamelled, / tell me if he through you he has passed!” (4)

12. – Meetings and failures to meet: “On my bed at night, I looked for the one I love; I sought him without finding him. I will rise and go about the city, through the streets and the squares I will seek the love of my heart. I sought him without finding him. The watchmen came upon me, as they made their rounds of the city: have you seen the love of my heart? As soon as I left them, I found the love of my heart” (3, 1-4), “I slept but my heart kept vigil. I heard the knock of my beloved. Open to  me my sister, my love, my perfect one, my dove; my head is wet with dew, my hair with the drops of the night… My lover thrust his hand through the lock opening, and my heart thrilled for him. I rose to open the door. Myrrh from my hands dripped on the handle of the lock. I opened to my lover but he had turned and gone. My soul went after him. I sought but did not find him; I called him but he did not answer. The watchmen came upon me as they made their rounds of the city. They beat me… I beg you, O daughters of Jerusalem, if you ever find my lover, tell him that love makes me sick” (5, 2 - 8; 2, 5).

13. – In the Spiritual Song: “But, how you persist, / o life! not living where you live, / and making for your death / the arrows you receive / of which from the lover you inside conceive?” (8), “shut down my angers / since nothing is capable of undoing them / and let my eyes see you, / since you are their fire/ and only for you I want to have them” (10), “where did you hide, / my love, and left me with wail? / Like the deer you fled, / having wounded me, / I went out after you crying, and you had left!” (1), “ay! who will be able to heal me? /  It just truly delivered you. / Do not be willing to send me / today’s more messengers; who do not know to tell me what I desire!” (6), “why, since you wounded / this heart, you do not heal it? / And, since you stole it to me, / why did you so leave it / and you do not take the theft you stole?” (9).

14. – Questions and doubts: What is special in him?, what does he do?, where is he? “How is your lover better than others? Radiant and ruddy my lover stands out among thousands” (5, 9-10). “Where has your lover gone, most beautiful woman? Where has your lover turned, that we may help you look for him?”. “My lover has gone down to his garden, to the beds of spices, to pasture his flock in the garden and to gather lilies. My lover is mine, and I am his; he shepherds his flock among the lilies” (6, 1-3).

15. - In the Spiritual Song: “My lover, the mountains, / the forest full lonely valleys / the strange islands, / the sonorous rivers, / the whistle of the loving airs” (14), “Stop, dead north wind! Come, south, that you recall the romances, / inhale through my garden, / and let their smell to run, /and the lover will pasture between the flowers!” (17), “of flowers and emeralds, / in fresh selected mornings, / we will make the garlands, / in your love flourished / and in one of my hairs interweaved” (30)

16. – Secret date: All of a sudden appears the lover, swift and fast like a deer. He dates his lover in a secret place: “The voice of my lover! Behold he comes, springing across the mountains, jumping over the hills. Like a gazelle or a young stag. Now he stands behind our wall, looking through the windows, peering through the lattice. My lover speaks to me, and tells me: Arise, my love, my beautiful one, come, the winter is gone, the rains are over. Flowers have appeared on earth; the season of singing has come… O my dove in the rocky cleft, in the secret places of the cliff, let me see our face, let me hear your voice” (2, 8-16).

17. – In the Spiritual Song: “Come back, dove, / that the harmed deer / over the hillock shows / under the air of your flight, and fresh air he aspires” (13), “let us enjoy, my lover / and let us go to see your beauty / to the mountain or the hill, / from where the pure water flows; / let us penetrate into the heart of the woods” (36), “and then to the high / stone caves we will go / that are deep hidden, / and there we will enter, / and the must of the pomegranate we will test” (37), “hunt the foxes / that our vine is already flourished, / while with roses / we make a bouquet, / and nobody shows over the cliff” (16), “the quite night / and the eastern winds at dawn / the silent music / the noisy loneliness / the dinner that entertains and delights” (15), “in the internal cellar / of my lover I drank, and when I went out / through that meadows / I nothing knew / and the livestock I used to follow I lost” (26), there he gave me his breast; / there he taught me very tasty thing / and in fact I gave him / myself without leaving out anything; / there I promised him to be his wife” (27), “since if in the common land / I would not be seen nor found, / you would say that I lost myself; / that going around in love, / I feigned to be lost, and I was wined” (29), “the white dove / the arc with the branch she has taken, / and the turtledove / the desired associate / in the green banks he has found” (34).

18. – Wedding, unity: The boyfriend: “Who is coming from the wilderness, like a pillar of smoke, perfumed with myrrh and frankincense?... King Salomon has made for himself a carriage of wood from Lebanon, its columns of silver, its back of gold, its seat of purple cloth, its framework inlaid with ivory. Come, daughters of Zion, see King Salomon wearing the diadem with which his mother crowned him on the day of his wedding, on the day his heart rejoiced” (3, 6- 11). The girlfriend: “Who is this coming from wilderness, leaning upon her lover?” (8, 5), “Who is this coming like the dawn, fair as the moon, bright as the sun, majestic as bannered troops?” (6, 10), “thus I have become, in his wyes, like one who brings peace” (8, 10).

19. – In the Spiritual Song: “Our flourished bed, / of lions´ caves tied, / in purple laid, / of peace built, / of thousand gold shields crowned” (24), “O nymphs of Judea!, while in flowers and rose bushes / the amber scents, / dwells in the suburbs, / and do not be willing to touch our gates” (18), “to the light birds, / lions, deer, jumping bucks, / mounts, valleys, banks, / waters, airs, ardour / and fears in the night sentinels” (20), “by the pleasant lyres / and the mermaids songs, I entreat you / to cease your angers / and do not touch the wall, / so that the wife safer sleeps” (21), “lonely she lived, / and lonely she already made her nest / and lonely she guides him / lonely her loved one, / lonely also of wounded love” (35), “there you would show me / what my soul pretended / and then you would give me / there you, my life, what you gave me the other day” (38).

20. – Consent, fidelity: “I woke you under the apple tree, where you were conceived by your mother, where she who bore you was in travail. Set me a seal on your heart, set me as a seal on your arm. For love is strong as death; its jealousy lasting as the power of death, it burns like a blazing fire, it blazes like a mighty flame. No flood can extinguish love, nor river submerge it. If a man were to buy love with all the wealth of his house, contempt is all he would purchase” (8, 5-7).

21. – In the Spiritual Song: “In there is the wife / in the desired pleasant orchard, / and on its taste she rests / the neck leaned / upon the sweet arms of the lover” (22), “under the apple tree, / there with me you married, / there I gave you the hand, / and you were restored / where your mother were raped” (23), “to inhale the air, / the song of the sweet filomena, / the grove and its grace / in the calm night, / with the flame that consumes and no sorrow was present” (39), “my soul has been used / and all my wealth to her service. / I do not already keep livestock / nor I have another job, / since only to love is now my exercise” (28).

 

* Dialogue: The Song of Songs

-          allegoric, spiritual interpretation

-          literal, love poems interpretation

-          wisdom and religious background, able to delight the youngsters

-          comparison between the Song and the Spiritual Song

-          human word, God´s word

-          the wedding wine, a gospel’s signal (Jn 2, 1-11)