Song Of Solomon 2

The Inner Drama of Love’s Awakening

Song of Solomon 2, read as an inner drama, is a precise map of how consciousness courts, discovers, and finally recognizes its own creative power. The poem stages an intimate interplay between two poles of the psyche: the longing, receptive self (the beloved, the lover, often voiced in the first person) and the active, revealing Self (the beloved who comes, leaps, and calls). Every landscape, plant, and action registers a state of mind. Taken psychologically, the language becomes a practical guide to the imagination as the engine that composes experience.

The opening images — rose of Sharon, lily of the valleys — name beauty as a quality of the inner life. The beloved is not a person outside; she is the self as adorned by imagination. The rose and the lily point to distinct tones of consciousness: the rose, a humble yet resilient center blooming even in plain ground; the lily, an elevated purity among thorns, a state of clarity that distinguishes itself from distracting beliefs. To call one’s love a lily among thorns is to locate affection or devotion in a field of competing, thorny ideas. The inner lover has learned to be lovely despite the surrounding judgments that would choke creative feeling.

As the apple tree among the trees of the wood, the beloved is an axis of provision — a source of sweet fruit — in the broader mental forest. Sitting under his shadow with great delight, the speaker describes the inward habit of resting in an imagined reality where one is nourished. The shadow here is not absence but the presence of sheltering imagination. Its fruit is sweet because it is the product of a sustained, pleasurable assumption. This is the core practice: assume the inner banquet and taste its sweetness, and your outer sense will register the flavor.

The banqueting house, with its banner of love, signals the house of the imaginal feast — the mind that has embraced its desire and dines upon the feeling of fulfillment. Banner and feast represent the public proclamation within the self: the state is now adopted; love claims the psyche. Asking to be staid with flagons and comforted with apples reads as a craving for continual reinforcement of the assumed state. Being sick of love is not a pathology here but an intense saturation with the desired feeling, the kind of inner intoxication that dissolves lesser affections and anchors attention where one wants reality to be formed.

The physical intimacy — left hand under my head, right hand embracing — describes two complementary functions within consciousness. The left hand under the head can be read as the foundation of rest, the memory and receptivity that supports the dream. The right hand embracing is the active power that holds the assumption close and prevents doubt from intruding. Together they form a secure posture: rest in the imagined state and actively embrace it until it feels indelible.

The injunction to the daughters of Jerusalem — do not stir up, nor awake my love, till he please — is a psychological caution against premature suggestion, external agitation, or communal commentary that would rouse desire into anxious striving. The daughters represent public opinion, collective doubts, and premature counsel. The inner work requires the sovereign timing of imagination; it is diminished if stirred by outside voices before its appointed maturation.

When the beloved's voice is heard, coming to the music of inner awakening — leaping upon the mountains, skipping upon the hills — it personifies the creative act issuing from imagination. Mountains and hills are the grand formations of belief and habit; to leap upon them is to animate them with new possibility. The beloved as a roe, nimble and alert, indicates how the creative self moves: lightly, quickly, and with an economy of effort. It does not batter facts into submission but springs through the landscape of belief, finding hidden passages and vantage points from which reality can be transformed.

The image of the beloved standing behind our wall, looking forth at the windows, showing himself through the lattice, captures the way imagination initially appears: partly hidden, mediated by the lattice of perception and preconception. Windows and lattice are the channels of sensory awareness; through them the inner beloved peeks, suggesting the form of the wish. The invitation to rise up and come away is a command to shift identity — to leave winter (limitation) and enter the season of fruition and song.

Winter past, flowers appearing, singing of birds, the voice of the turtledove — these mark the chronological rhythm of an inner becoming. Winter is the period of doubt, scarcity, and contraction. Its passing signifies the cessation of negative expectation. Flowers appear as emergent beliefs flowering into image; birds are the affirmations, the spontaneous music of a mind in love with its own assumption. The turtledove, intimate and quiet, denotes the private assurance that accompanies the vocal sounds of imagination: the small, faithful affirmations that reinforce the larger scene.

The fig tree putting forth green figs and the vines with tender grapes that give a good smell are unmistakable symbols of ripening ideas. The fig and the tender grape suggest stages of growth within imagination: from green, inchoate concept to the more fragrant, appealing fruition that perfumes consciousness. Fruit here is the evidence of an interior attitude completed enough to supply sensory pleasure. When the mind dwells in these signs, it signals that manifestation is advancing from invisible cause to visible effect.

The beloved’s addressing of the hidden dove — 'O my dove that art in the clefts of the rock, in the secret places of the stairs' — is a call to the secluded, inner sanctuary. The clefts of the rock and secret stairways are not external locations but deep reserves of feeling and memory: early impressions, private convictions, tucked-away imaginings. The beloved wishes to see thy countenance and hear thy voice; psychologically, to see the countenance is to bring the hidden conviction into clear inner sight, and to hear the voice is to vocalize the assumed reality until it resonates throughout the field of consciousness.

Take us the foxes, the little foxes, that spoil the vines — this line is a strategic warning. Small, habitual negativities, petty resentments, contradictory doubts, and idle fears are the foxes that gnaw at the tender vines of newly planted assumption. They are not the grand objections but the casual, repeated underminers: a sarcastic thought here, an old apology there, invitations to 'be realistic' that gradually hollow out the vineyard. The remedy is vigilance: attend to the small undermining beliefs before they spoil the fruition you have tenderly imagined.

My beloved is mine, and I am his; he feedeth among the lilies — the mutual belonging declares identification with the creative Self. Ownership here is psychological appropriation: once you habitually occupy the scene, it asserts itself as yours. To be fed among the lilies means to allow imagination to sustain you in that elevated, thornless field where loves and values are secure. 'Until the day break, and the shadows flee away' frames the temporal structure of manifestation: continue in the felt sense until the inner dawn arrives and shadows of doubt evaporate. The daybreak is not a metaphorical cosmic event alone; it is the moment your inner assumption has become irreversibly integrated into waking perception.

Turn, my beloved, and be thou like a roe upon the mountains of Bether — movement completes the drama. Bether, suggesting separation or parting, is no longer a place of exile but a mountain where the nimble self moves freely across divisions. The beloved's agility is the authorized method: move across contradictions, crossing old separations with the light-footedness of imagination. The self that practices this movement finds no obstacle absolute; every 'mountain' of belief becomes terrain to negotiate rather than a wall to be smashed.

Across this chapter, then, the creative power operating within human consciousness is presented not remotely but intimately. Imagination is the banquet-giver, the lover who comes and calls, the seed that flowers, and the musician of the heart. The psychological injunctions are practical: rest in the assumed state; embrace it with active feeling; protect it from premature suggestion; guard against small undermining habits; continue until dawn. The poem does not narrate a marriage of two external persons but stages the return of the self to its own plenary being — an inner recognition that reshapes the outer world. Read as instruction, Song of Solomon 2 offers a compact, lyrical manual for enacting creativity: cultivate your inner garden, invite the beloved to reveal the countenance of your desire, and remain until the imagined day has fully dawned.