In the Library
Song of Songs
Anonymous, 500 BCE
- Form
- Form Poem
- Difficulty
- Difficulty Moderate
- Reading time
- Reading time 10 minutes
- Translated by
- Translated by King James Version (1611)
- Original
- Original he
- Chapters
- Chapters 8
- Length
- Length 3k words
£1.99
Read in the app, yours for good. Not yet by post.
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Many waters cannot quench love, neither can the floods drown it.
What buying means
- Yours for good, on every iPhone you sign in to.
- Read in the app’s own reader, with the original beside the translation where there is one.
- Downloaded, so it reads with no signal.
- The same price as in the app. Folio already opens every book on this shelf; buying keeps this one after Folio ends. A refund takes it back.
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Song of Myself
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Whitman's poem does the same thing, but it turns that same sensuous, cataloguing hunger for the body outward onto an entire country.
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Love Songs of Ancient Egypt
Unknown
The Egyptian love songs are older still, with the same lovers longing for each other across gardens and calling one another sister and brother.
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About the book
Set me as a seal upon thine heart, for love is strong as death. The line arrives late in Song of Songs, and every verse before it has been laying the ground. Two lovers call to each other across vineyards and gardens and the roofs of a sleeping city, praising one another body by body, in spices and pomegranates and gazelles on the mountains. The woman speaks first and speaks most, which in poetry this old is close to unheard of. God is never named in it, not once. There is no law here, no covenant, only wanting, and the terrible night when she goes down into the streets and cannot find him. Rabbi Akiva called it the Holy of Holies of the scriptures, and it is hard to argue with him: nothing else in the Bible says so plainly that desire for another person is a sacred thing. Many waters cannot quench it, the poem swears, neither can the floods drown it.