Catholic Commentary
The Lover's Delight and Desire for the Beloved
6How beautiful and how pleasant you are, love, for delights!7This, your stature, is like a palm tree, your breasts like its fruit.8I said, “I will climb up into the palm tree. I will take hold of its fruit.” Let your breasts be like clusters of the vine, the smell of your breath like apples.9Your mouth is like the best wine, that goes down smoothly for my beloved, gliding through the lips of those who are asleep.
Song of Solomon 7:6–9 presents an extended celebration of the beloved's beauty and desirability through vivid comparisons: her stature resembles a palm tree, her mouth is like fine wine, and the lover declares his active intention to ascend and grasp her fruits. The passage emphasizes sensory delight and erotic pursuit while suggesting that love involves mutual reciprocity and voice rather than one-directional possession.
The lover's bold resolve to climb the palm tree transforms desire from passive admiration into active pursuit—and Christ desires the soul in exactly this way, with relentless initiative and delight.
Commentary
Song of Solomon 7:6 – "How beautiful and how pleasant you are" The exclamation opens with a double superlative — yafah (beautiful, outward form) and na'im (pleasant, delightful, agreeable to the senses and heart) — suggesting that the beloved surpasses beauty in both appearance and experience. This is not mere aesthetic admiration but a comprehensive delight: the lover finds in the beloved not only something to behold but something to inhabit with joy. The Hebrew word na'im carries connotations of sweetness and restfulness — it is the word used in Psalm 133 ("How good and pleasant it is when brothers dwell in unity"). The verse thus introduces the theme of love as a resting place, a homecoming, not merely an attraction.
Song of Solomon 7:7 – "This, your stature, is like a palm tree" The comparison of the beloved's stature (qomah, uprightness, height, bearing) to a tamar (date palm) is rich in biblical symbolism. The palm tree is an image of the just person (Psalm 92:12: "The righteous flourish like the palm tree"), of victory (palm branches in John 12), and of fruitfulness in arid conditions — the palm survives and thrives where other plants cannot. The beloved's clusters of fruit (her breasts) are compared to grape clusters, evoking abundance, nourishment, and vintage wine. Her uprightness is not rigidity but the noble, life-giving height of one rooted deeply and bearing fruit bountifully. In the ancient Near Eastern world, the date palm was also associated with royalty and with the goddess of love; the sacred poet deliberately appropriates this imagery and purifies it within Israel's theology of covenant love.
Song of Solomon 7:8 – "I will climb up into the palm tree" This verse is among the most dramatically active in the Song. The lover does not wait passively — he resolves to ascend ('e'eleh, a cohortative expressing firm intention). The climbing of the palm tree is an image of pursuit, of the deliberate effort required to reach the fruits that grow at the highest point. The grasping of the branches (sansinnim, the palm-frond clusters, perhaps the hanging fruit clusters) suggests both tenderness and bold initiative. This verse speaks to the theology of love as active desire that overcomes inertia and difficulty. The comparison of breath to the scent of apples continues the sensory feast, grounding love in the fullness of embodied human experience. The nose, the hands, the eyes — every faculty is engaged.
Song of Solomon 7:9 – "Your mouth is like the best wine" The yayin hatov — the good wine, the finest wine — evokes both Cana (John 2) and the Eucharist. The beloved's speech, her very breath and word, is intoxicating in the finest sense: life-giving, celebratory, transforming. The verse ends with a remarkable shift of voice — in many manuscripts and the LXX tradition, the beloved herself completes the verse ("going down smoothly for my beloved, gliding over lips and teeth"), suggesting that the language of praise flows through the one praised, that love generates a mutual voice. The "best wine" going down smoothly (meisharim, with equity, uprightness) adds a moral dimension: true love is not distorting or disorienting but clarifying, it flows with justice and integrity.
Catholic Commentary
Catholic tradition has interpreted this passage through several complementary lenses, each authorized by the sensus plenior — the fuller sense of Scripture acknowledged in Dei Verbum §12.
The Christological-Ecclesial Reading: Origen, in his Commentary on the Song of Songs (the foundational patristic text for this book), reads the lover as the Logos and the beloved as the Church or the individual soul. The palm-climbing becomes an image of the Incarnation: Christ descends from divine heights to "ascend" into human nature and draw humanity upward to himself. St. Bernard of Clairvaux, in his Sermons on the Song of Songs, reads the "pleasant and beautiful" as the soul adorned with virtue, and the wine of verse 9 as a figure of sacred doctrine and ultimately of the Eucharistic chalice — the "best wine" Christ gives his Bride at every Mass.
The Marian Reading: Several Church Fathers and Doctors apply the beloved's portrait to the Blessed Virgin Mary. The palm tree image — upright, fruitful, enduring in arid conditions — resonates with Marian typology: she who bore the fruit of life (Luke 1:42) and stood upright even at the foot of the Cross. The Catechism (§773) notes that "Mary goes before us all in the holiness that is the Church's mystery." The lover's bold desire to ascend to the fruit of the palm echoes the soul's pilgrimage to Christ through Mary.
Sacramental Marriage: The Catechism (§§1601–1608) teaches that the Song of Songs is among the scriptural witnesses that human conjugal love participates in and images God's love for Israel and Christ's love for the Church. John Paul II, in his Theology of the Body, specifically treats the Song as a "great poem on human love" that reveals the nuptial meaning of the body — that physical beauty and desire, properly ordered, are a sacramental sign pointing toward the self-giving love of the Trinity.
For Today
For contemporary Catholics, these verses offer a counter-cultural theology of desire. In a culture that either represses eros through shame or exhausts it through commodification, the Song insists that desire itself — rightly ordered — is holy. The lover's bold resolve to "climb the palm tree" is a rebuke to spiritual passivity: authentic love, whether for a spouse, for God, or for the Church, requires initiative, effort, and willingness to reach for what is highest.
Practically, married Catholics can pray with these verses as an act of spiritual renewal in their vocation — allowing the bridegroom's delight in the bride to rekindle the dignity they see in each other. Single or consecrated persons can read the lover's pursuit as a meditation on how Christ ceaselessly desires the soul, never growing weary or indifferent.
The image of the "best wine" also invites every Catholic to approach the Eucharist with renewed hunger: the finest wine is given freely. Do we receive it as lovers, or as distracted guests? Let these verses make the Liturgy of the Eucharist feel less routine and more like a lover's feast.
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