Spikenard and Saffron: The Imagery of the Song of Songs

This study focuses upon the language of the Song of Songs in an attempt to see how individual images work together in the constitution of a poetic unity. The perception of certain 'imaginative fields', each of which organizes a range of related imagery, is helpful to an appreciation of the symbolic density which certain images acquire in the course of the Song's movement and to an acknowledgment of their capacity for narrativity.