Biblion Bible Commentary
Read the introduction to Song of Solomon · About this commentary
Behold, You Are Beautiful
Song of Solomon 1:15-2:3
15 Behold, you are beautiful, my love. Behold, you are beautiful. Your eyes are like doves. · WEB
Praise answers praise in matched lines, and each lover takes the other's modest claim and raises it.
The exchange runs in couplets. Behold, you are beautiful — his line, doubled for emphasis, with the first of the book's dove images: her eyes. She returns it with the same words and one addition — beautiful, yes, pleasant — and then furnishes the scene: their couch is the green grass, their beams cedars, their rafters firs. The forest is their architecture. The love that will later fill palace rooms begins outdoors, in a house the land itself builds.
Then she estimates herself, and the estimate is modest: a flower of Sharon's plain, a lily of the valleys — spring blooms that come by the thousand, lovely and common. It is the opposite of the exotic.
He takes her exact word and reframes it: a lily among thorns — so is my love among the daughters. Common by the thousand, until you stand it beside everything else.
She answers in the same shape: an apple tree among the trees of the wood — fruit and fragrance where the forest gives timber. And she does what the poem keeps letting her do: she sits in the shade and tastes the fruit, delight described as delight.
Neither of them invents praise from nothing. Each takes what the other offered and returns it raised — which is this book's picture of how love talks.
settled What this mark means