My beloved is mine

When I taught literature, I told students that poetry is a “concentrated excess of language.”  Song of Songs 2:16a is poetry of poetry.

Woodenly translated, it says, “My beloved to me, and I to him.”  The overlapping structures in that deceptively simple statement are wondrous.  On the one hand, it is a parallel structure, repeating the prepositional phrase with “to”:

A. My beloved

B. to me

A’. and I

B’. to him

On the other hand, it is a chiasm:

A. My beloved (that is, the man)

B. to me

B’. I

A’. to him.

In the Hebrew, the concentration is even more evident.  The sentence is only four Hebrew words: dodi li v’ani lo .  The music is complex and lovely.  The line divides into two three-syllable sections: dodi li / v’ani lo .  Each of the first three words ends with a hireq-yod, usually pronounced with a long “e” sound: dodee lee va’anee.  The first half-line ends with the upward “ee” sound, while the second half-line ends with a lowering “o” that suggests closure.    There’s a rough aural chiasm going too.  Look at the vowels: 0-i-i-a-i-o.  The concluding ” lo ” echoes the opening ” do ,” and in the center are three rhyming syllables – di , li , ni .  From the opening “o,” he line rises through a series of “ees” and then quietly slides to the concluding “o.”

All that, and we’ve not even begun to look at the meaning of the words.