You Are All Beautiful, My Love
1 Behold, you are beautiful, my love. Behold, you are beautiful. Your eyes are like doves behind your veil. Your hair is as a flock of goats, that descend from Mount Gilead. 2 Your teeth are like a newly shorn flock, which have come up from the washing, where every one of them has twins. None is bereaved among them. 3 Your lips are like scarlet thread. Your mouth is lovely. Your temples are like a piece of a pomegranate behind your veil. 4 Your neck is like David’s tower built for an armory, on which a thousand shields hang, all the shields of the mighty men. 5 Your two breasts are like two fawns that are twins of a roe, which feed among the lilies. 6 Until the day is cool, and the shadows flee away, I will go to the mountain of myrrh, to the hill of frankincense. 7 You are all beautiful, my love. There is no spot in you.
The first full praise poem compares by motion rather than by shape, and it ends in a verdict of no flaw.
The praise runs downward from the eyes, and nearly every image moves. Her eyes are doves behind the veil. Her hair is a flock of goats descending the slopes of Gilead — black goats flowing downhill, a dark cascade seen from across a valley. Her teeth are ewes coming up from the washing, every one paired, none missing — matched and complete, a flock with no gap in it. The comparisons are not photographs; they are landscapes in motion, and what they praise is the life in her, not an arrangement of features.
Her lips are a scarlet thread; her temples behind the veil glow like cut pomegranate. Then the tower: her neck like David's tower hung with a thousand shields — ornament described as armament. He praises her the way one praises a defended city, and the book remembers the image: at the end it is she who says I am a wall, my breasts like towers Song of Solomon 8:10. Her strength is part of her beauty from the first inventory.
Her breasts are twin fawns among the lilies — young, soft, alive; the one line of this poem he will repeat exactly, much later Song of Solomon 7:3.
Verse 6 answers her own earlier clock Song of Solomon 2:17: until the day breathes, he will go to the mountain of myrrh — her scent-country. And verse 7 closes the audit with a total: you are all beautiful, my love; there is no flaw in you. Love's arithmetic finds nothing to subtract.
settled What this mark means