Golden Lyrics
Snuffy, prosy men always keep pawing over the poets. It is bad enough when they are only literary critics, but when they are theologians there is no length to which they will not go. Think what has happened to that radiant anthology which the late Morris Jastrow translated and edited as his final work, The Song of Songs. Originally, it seems clear, a collection of popular lyrics which the Hebrew folk prized so highly as to insist on giving them a place in the sacred canon, these poems have been argued and allegorized to what would have been the death of anything less indestructible. While the Stoics were “explaining” Homer, partly Hellenized Jews began to interpret the Song of Songs as an expression of Yahweh’s love for Israel and then Christians as an expression of Christ’s love for his Church. Learned scholiasts wallowed in commentary, declaring, for instance, that the phrase “eyes like doves” referred to the wise men of the Sanhedrin or to the thoughts of God directed toward Jerusalem. Augustine saw in “where thou reclinest at noon” a hint that the true Church lay under the meridian—that is, in Augustine’s Africa! Bernard of Burgundy composed eighty-six homilies on the first two chapters. The Jewish Saadia, writing in the tenth century, detected in the Song of Songs a complete history of the Jews from the Exodus to the coming of a twelfth-century Messiah; and Thomas Brightman in 1600 drew the prophecy down to Luther and Melancthon. Not until the Enlightenment, in the hands of Lowth and Herder, did criticism become more direct and reasonable. Even after that the passion for finding some kind of unity in the book led even such scholars as Ewald, Delitzsch, Renan to explain it as a rudimentary drama, with Solomon as one of the characters. There were, of course, always heretics, like Thomas Hardy’s Respectable Burgher, who slyly rejoiced to learn
“That Solomon sang the fleshly Fair
And gave the Church no thought whate’er,”
but they were generally outside the beaten track of doctrine.
Mr. Jastrow brought to his labours on the Song of Songs at once the erudition and common sense with which he had already edited Job and Ecclesiastes and in addition a feeling for youth and love and poetry which his latest theme particularly required. In a masterly introduction, utilizing all that is known about the book and reducing it to convenient form for a wide audience, he cuts away the accretions of centuries while tracing the fortunes of this golden treasury with its cloud of commentators. Then he offers a new translation divided into twenty-three separate lyrics, each of which he equips with adequate yet simple notes, purging the text of intrusive variants and glosses, explaining the allusions, sympathetically pointing out the grace and spontaneity of the poems. In his treatment the Song of Songs is restored to an ancient status which gives it a fresh, modern meaning. Once more the Palestinian villagers have come together at a wedding; once more they sing exquisite songs about the joys of love which no thought of theology invades. Lover and beloved praise one another’s charms in glowing imagery. Alone, each longs for the other; united, they rush to ecstatic, unabashed consummation of their desire. This is love at its rosy dawn, tremulous, candid, exultant. This is what Wilfrid Scawen Blunt had in mind when he declared in his diary that he would rather have written the Song of Songs than all the rest of literature.