How Beautiful Are Your Feet
1 How beautiful are your feet in sandals, prince’s daughter! Your rounded thighs are like jewels, the work of the hands of a skillful workman. 2 Your body is like a round goblet, no mixed wine is wanting. Your waist is like a heap of wheat, set about with lilies. 3 Your two breasts are like two fawns, that are twins of a roe. 4 Your neck is like an ivory tower. Your eyes are like the pools in Heshbon by the gate of Bathrabbim. Your nose is like the tower of Lebanon which looks toward Damascus. 5 Your head on you is like Carmel. The hair of your head like purple. The king is held captive in its tresses. 6 How beautiful and how pleasant you are, love, for delights! 7 This, your stature, is like a palm tree, your breasts like its fruit. 8 I said, “I will climb up into the palm tree. I will take hold of its fruit.” Let your breasts be like clusters of the vine, the smell of your breath like apples. 9 Your mouth is like the best wine, that goes down smoothly for my beloved, gliding through the lips of those who are asleep.
The praise runs feet-upward this time, drawn in the geography of the whole northern land, and ends with the king captive.
This praise poem inverts the first one's direction: it begins at her sandaled feet and climbs. Her thigh-curves are like ornaments, the work of a master's hands — the body as craftsmanship, and the craftsman implied. Her waist is a heap of wheat set about with lilies, her navel a rounded bowl of blended wine. Harvest and feast — nourishment praised as beauty. Her breasts are the twin fawns again, the one line carried over exactly from the first poem Song of Solomon 4:5.
Then the praise turns cartographic. Her neck is an ivory tower. Her eyes are the pools of Heshbon by the gate of Bath-rabbim. Her nose is the tower of Lebanon that faces Damascus, and her head rises like Mt Carmel above the sea. East of the Jordan, the far north, the coast. He draws her with the landmarks of the whole land, as she has been given En Gedi, Gilead and the capitals before Song of Solomon 1:14 Song of Solomon 4:1 Song of Solomon 6:4. In this book, to praise the beloved is to survey a country.
Her hair is purple, the royal dye. Then the line that crowns the poem: a king is held captive in its tresses. All the book's towers and armies, and the conqueror is conquered by hair.
He announces his intent as plainly as the Song ever speaks: the palm tree, and I will climb. Then, at the wine of verse 9, her voice takes over mid-image and finishes it — wine that goes down smoothly for my beloved. Even the praising becomes a duet. She drinks his metaphor back to him.
settled What this mark means