Many waters cannot quench love,
Deluges cannot overwhelm it.
Should a noble offer all the wealth of his house for love
It would be utterly spurned.”
Excluding the interrupting verses 8 and 9, the hymn is followed by a song about Solomon’s vineyard, preceded by two lines which appear to me to possess a significance overlooked by commentators. Shulamith (evidently) speaks:
“I was a wall, my breasts like its towers:
Thus have I been in his eyes as one finding peace.
Solomon hath a vineyard,” etc. [as above.]
The word “peace” is Shalôm; it is immediately followed by Shelomoh (Solomon, “peaceful”); and Shulamith (also meaning “peaceful”), thus brings together the fortress of her lover’s peace, her own breast, and the fortifications built by the peaceful King (who never attacked but was always prepared for defence). Here surely, at the close of Canticles, is a sort of tableau: Shalôm, Shulamith, Shelomoh: Peace, the prince of Peace, the queen of Peace. If this were the only lyric one would surely infer that these were the bride and bridegroom, under the benediction of Peace. It is not improbable that at this climax of the poem Shulamith means that in her lover she has found her Solomon, and he found in her his Solomona,—their reciprocal strongholds of Shalôm or Peace.
Of course my interpretations of the Song of Songs are largely conjectural, as all other interpretations necessarily are. The songs are there to be somehow explained, and it is of importance that every unbiassed student of the book should state his conjectures, these being based on the contents of the book, and not on the dogmatic theories which have been projected into it. I have been compelled, under the necessary limitations of an essay like the present, to omit interesting details in the work, but have endeavoured to convey the impression left on my own mind by a totally unprejudiced study. The conviction has grown upon me with every step that, even at the lowest date ever assigned it, the work represents the earliest full expression of romantic love known in any language. It is so entirely free from fabulous, supernatural, or even pious incidents and accents, so human and realistic, that its having escaped the modern playwright can only be attributed to the superstitious encrustations by which its beauty has been concealed for many centuries.