Dark, but Lovely
5 I am dark, but lovely, you daughters of Jerusalem, like Kedar’s tents, like Solomon’s curtains. 6 Don’t stare at me because I am dark, because the sun has scorched me. My mother’s sons were angry with me. They made me keeper of the vineyards. I haven’t kept my own vineyard. 7 Tell me, you whom my soul loves, where you graze your flock, where you rest them at noon; for why should I be as one who is veiled beside the flocks of your companions? 8 If you don’t know, most beautiful among women, follow the tracks of the sheep. Graze your young goats beside the shepherds’ tents.
Her first self-description answers watching eyes, and the vineyard she has not kept opens a figure the book closes only in its last lines.
She speaks to the daughters of Jerusalem before they have said anything — I am dark, but lovely — and the two comparisons she reaches for claim both of the book's worlds at once: Kedar's tents, black goat-hair weathered by desert sun, and Solomon's curtains, royal hangings. Field and court in one sentence, and she belongs to both.
Verse 6 explains the darkness and refuses shame about it. The sun scorched her because her mother's sons were angry and set her to keep the vineyards — and then the line that matters most: my own vineyard I have not kept. A vineyard tended for others, and her own left ungoverned. The book will not resolve that sentence until its final page, where she says at last that her vineyard, her very own, is before her Song of Solomon 8:12. The whole Song runs between those two lines.
Then she turns from the watchers to him: tell me where you graze your flock at noon — why should she wander veiled among strangers' flocks, looking like what she is not?
The answer sends her along the sheep tracks to the shepherds' tents. From its first scene the love has geography and work in it. She is not summoned to him; she is told the way.
settled What this mark means