Song Of Solomon 6

Song of Solomon 6: A Carefully Staged Drama of Inner Renewal

Song of Solomon 6 reads, when looked at as an interior drama, like a short scene in which a single consciousness discovers, recognizes, and calls forth its own creative power. The characters are not two separate people but names for states, movements, and capacities within the psyche: the Shulamite is the receptive, embodied awareness; the Beloved is the creative Imagination or Self; the daughters, queens, concubines, and virgins are the many attitudes, beliefs, and faculties that vie for attention. The landscapes — gardens, beds of spices, valleys, and pomegranates — are inner territories: feeling, desire, memory, and the hidden stores of meaning. Read this way, the chapter describes what happens when imagination descends into feeling, cultivates inner beauty, and returns to reveal a transformed self that commands its own life.

The chapter opens with a chorus asking, 'Whither is thy beloved gone, O thou fairest among women?' This question is the outer mind noticing an inner movement has taken place: the Beloved has withdrawn into the garden. Psychologically, the withdrawal is not abandonment but deliberate descent. The creative Self 'goes down into his garden' — into the world of feeling and image — to feed and to gather lilies. Imagination intentionally moves into sensation; it takes up residence in the emotional life to plant, tend, and harvest new states. The lilies are delicately realized convictions, newly grown qualities that scent and color the inner experience. To 'feed in the gardens' is to enact the discipline of living in chosen images until they fructify.

'I am my beloved’s, and my beloved is mine' is the mutual ownership of attention and imagination. The waking mind recognizes that its identity and the power that shapes reality are not separate. This is the psychological marriage: attention yields to an imagined state and the Imagination claims and molds the attention. When attention and imagination are conjoined the life one experiences shifts; 'he feedeth among the lilies' means the creative power now nourishes only those images that correspond to the new, desired reality.

The similes that follow — 'Thou art beautiful, O my love, as Tirzah, comely as Jerusalem, terrible as an army with banners' — map inner gradations of dignity and authority. Tirzah and Jerusalem are archetypal cities of inner beauty and order; to be 'comely as Jerusalem' is to embody peace, law, and a center that holds. To be 'terrible as an army with banners' is not violence but organized potency: imagination has become disciplined, collective, imposing. The mind is no longer scattered; it marshals its images as an army marshals banners — resolved, visible, and effective.

'Turn away thine eyes from me, for they have overcome me' points to what happens when attention is captured by its own beauty. The Shulamite, seeing her inner loveliness reflected, is overcome — she must look away lest fascination become distraction. Psychologically this is the paradox of self-recognition: once a higher state of consciousness appears, the old self is disarmed and must surrender to the new. Hair 'as a flock of goats' and teeth 'as a flock of sheep' are sensual metaphors for streams of thought and clusters of clarity moving as a collective. Hair suggests flowing mental images; teeth suggest order and function, each tooth bearing 'twins' — paired faculties working together — and none 'barren' — a mind bearing fruit on every side.

'As a piece of a pomegranate are thy temples within thy locks' locates fertility at the temples: the place of thought and imagination is seeded and abundant. The pomegranate, with its many seeds, symbolizes the multiplicity of creative possibilities contained within a single center of consciousness. Every temple within the locks is ripe with potential images waiting to be released into the world. This is not primitive sensuality but the announcement that the mind, when rightly cultivated, is fertile beyond measure.

The enumeration of 'threescore queens, and fourscore concubines, and virgins without number' dramatizes the multiplicity of aspects in consciousness. There are many voices, urges, roles, and potentials. Yet 'My dove, my undefiled, is but one; she is the only one of her mother, she is the choice one of her that bare her.' This single 'dove' is pure attention, the focused faculty that remains unstained by anxious desire. Among the many internal prompts, only one is the chosen channel for the creative Self. The psychological teaching is precise: though the mind is crowded with suggestions, only one chosen awareness — the dove — receives the creative seed and incubates the new reality.

The reaction of the daughters, the queens, and the concubines, who bless and praise her, indicates how outer attitudes and secondary states are compelled to acknowledge the central, awakened image. When the pure attention takes its place, the other aspects fall into a chorus of recognition. This is the integrative effect of living in an imaginative conviction: the subconscious and the social faculties align to mirror and support the chosen inner state.

'Who is she that looketh forth as the morning, fair as the moon, clear as the sun, and terrible as an army with banners?' Here is a presentation of sequential states of consciousness. The 'morning' is awakening, the first light of awareness. The 'moon' is reflected beauty, cool and discerning; the 'sun' is direct illumination and clarity; and the 'army with banners' is organized creative power displayed in the outer world. Together they describe the ascent of an inner image from dawn to full light, then to effective manifestation. The individual who looks forth in this way has passed from private imaginings to public authority: imagination has become causative.

'I went down into the garden of nuts to see the fruits of the valley' is the narrative voice of exploration. This is the deliberate inspection of one's inner harvest. To 'see whether the vine flourished, and the pomegranates budded' is the self-audit: does the inner cultivation bear fruit? The mind checks itself, watching the outcomes of its imaginative acts. 'Or ever I was aware, my soul made me like the chariots of Amminadib' marks an unexpected uplift: the soul accelerates; the imagination's harvest launches consciousness into motion. Chariots are vehicles of transition — they quicken the inner state from contemplation to embodied movement.

'Return, return, O Shulamite; return, return, that we may look upon thee' is the call to reintegration. The community of inner faculties and relationships calls the realized attention back, not to diminish its newness, but to anchor it in daily life where others can witness and be transformed. The psychological drama insists on return: the inner visionary must bring the imagined state back into the marketplace of life, to demonstrate that imagination can persist amid the ordinary and thereby reshape it.

'What will ye see in the Shulamite? As it were the company of two armies.' The final image is a synthesis: two armies suggest balanced forces — conscious and subconscious, masculine and feminine, thought and feeling — aligned under the banner of the newly realized state. This is the enlightened psyche: contradiction resolved into coordination. Imagination has done its work; it descended, cultivated, returned, and harmonized the inner multiplicity into a single creative movement.

Throughout the chapter the creative principle operates within human consciousness by a simple grammar: imagine, inhabit the image, persist, and let feeling and attention integrate until the outer life conforms. The Beloved’s descent into the garden is the essential act: Imagination must enter feeling to plant its seeds. The Shulamite’s recognition and surrender is the necessary yielding of attention. The many queens and concubines are the unconscious contents that must be organized or acknowledged, and only the chosen dove becomes the vessel of new creation. The rising images of morning, moon, and sun are the stages of realization, and the chariots and armies are the forces by which inner changes become outer patterns.

This chapter, read psychologically, is an instructional map: it shows how the inner theater stages the birth of a new life. It teaches that beauty and power are not accidental but the fruit of disciplined imaginative attention, that the soul accelerates when inner images are ripe, and that true return is the act of bringing the inner kingdom into living expression. The Scripture here speaks not of lovers in the field but of the single human faculty that, when claimed and tended, becomes both bride and bridegroom, gardener and harvest, dawn and commanded army. Imagination creates and consciousness obeys; the drama concludes when the two armies march together under one banner.