Behold, You Are Beautiful
15 Behold, you are beautiful, my love. Behold, you are beautiful. Your eyes are like doves. 16 Behold, you are beautiful, my beloved, yes, pleasant; and our couch is verdant. 17 The beams of our house are cedars. Our rafters are firs. Song of Solomon 2 1 I am a rose of Sharon, a lily of the valleys. 2 As a lily among thorns, so is my love among the daughters. 3 As the apple tree among the trees of the wood, so is my beloved among the sons. I sat down under his shadow with great delight, his fruit was sweet to my taste.
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