Yesterday, a brief and multiply allusive birthday poem for my friend Sharon (“A rose for Sharon”, on this blog here), along with the birthday gift to her of a big spathiphyllum plant, which should soon send up some of its sexy flowers. Various associations floated in my mind along with the plants and their symbolic eroticism.
Molly Bloom and her soliloquy of yes, but directed to a woman. And, overwhelmingly, the singer of the Song of Solomon 2:1, a woman who declares that she is (figuratively) the rose of Sharon and the lily of the valleys and goes on into (heterosexual) erotic verse from the woman’s point of view (which can of course be repurposed as directed to a woman), ending with a surprising celebration of spring (in places where winter is the rainy season), suggesting a springtime of her body as well as the season:
My beloved spake, and said unto me,
Rise up, my love, my fair one, and come away.
For lo, the winter is past,
The rain is over and gone.
And from that I’m taken to shapenote music and to factual questions about the plant the rose of Sharon and about Sharon the place from which this plant (and the Sharons of this world) got its name.
