‘Eating Sex’ and the Unlovely Song of Songs: Reading Consumption,Excretion and D.H. Lawrence

Le Hors d'œuvre

In her book Carnal Appetites, Elspeth Probyn devotes a chapter to ‘Eating Sex’. ² The amuse bouche to her essay comes in the form of a brief treatment of Bill Clinton, whose brush with oral sexuality neatly illuminates for Probyn the social alliance between the gastronomic and the erotic. If Clinton did ‘not have sex with that woman’ as he claimed, then Probyn asks what Monica Lewinski was imagined to be doing. ‘If oral sex isn't sex, is it eating? And conversely’, Probyn wonders, ‘when is eating sex?’ ³

What Probyn's subsequent discussion indicates is that the lines are not at all clear. Hands stuffed into galline cavities, tenderized rumps, and the toasted soldiers taking turns on the soft-boiled yolk are each suggestive of a disquieting crossover. So too is the sugary pet name and the aphrodisiac oyster (with its salty remembrances-cum-precursors); the dilemma of breast versus thigh; the virgin cocktail; the bun in the oven—and so on and so on ad nauseum. Probyn's point is that sex and eating both consist in pointedly sensory relationships that ‘connect us with surfaces, textures, tastes, smells, insides and outsides’. Both activities also open out the allegedly closed body to the wider world, reminding us that the body is part of a network of processes and not a discrete ‘thing’. And yet, paradoxically, food and sex have also served historically to police boundaries and re-enforce our perception of ourselves as closed sites through our register of personal tastes and proclivities: you are what you eat, mon petit choux. ⁴ In short, food is a way into theorizing the vicissitudes of sexual identity and praxis, and vice versa. As Clinton perhaps knew, to control definitions of sexuality one needs to control how we codify orality and represent the (female) body's fluxing relationship with the world.

For the reader of the Hebrew Bible, this set of connections has obvious significance since so many Hebrew texts combine sex and eating, though we do not always think of them in quite that way. It would be difficult for instance to separate out the orchard of Genesis 1–3 from the first human pair. This couple emerges from the same loam as the trees, errs by means of their fruit and is punished for eating under taxonomy of gendered politics. In the end they go out into creation to ‘be fruitful’ and to multiply and to till the fertile ground. It would be similarly problematic to parcel off the dietary requirements of Leviticus from the prescriptions about childbirth and bodily discharges against which they are framed (Lev. 11–12). This is to say nothing of Leah and her mandrakes (Gen. 30), or Noah, Ham and the curious incident of the post-diluvian vineyard (Gen. 9.20–21). In the present study I wish to focus, however, on the most obvious biblical example of sexualized food: the Song of Songs.

In the Song, amorous foodstuffs abound: ‘Let him kiss me with the kisses of his mouth, for your lovemaking is better than wine’ (1.2); ‘Your cheek behind your veil is like a half of a pomegranate’ (4.3); ‘Your lips distal nectar, my bride; honey and milk are under your tongue’ (4.11). According to Roland Boer, the female protagonist has ejaculations of pomegranates in 4.13. ⁵ According to the male lover, his companion's nose circuitously smells of apples in 7.9b. ⁶ ‘Eat friends’, the lovers cheerfully exhort us in 5.1, ‘drink, and be drunk with love!’

These examples beg consideration alongside Probyn's analysis and in this article I experiment with the comfiture of the lovers' affections to revisit some essential questions regarding the poem's depiction of love and sex. My central argument is that the poetic foodstuff is not a symbol of the mingling and fusion of the lovers (as is often claimed) but a wrinkle in the text where we can glimpse a breakdown in the poem's Arcadian tone. Several voices have begun to question the Song's bucolic credentials—led by Fiona Black, Athalya Brenner, Roland Boer and others—and questions have begun to emerge about whether ‘literal’ readings of the poem are allegories in modern guise. This article integrates the foodstuff that has long been utilized in romantic readings of the Song into this more sceptical view of the poem. I wish also to suggest that this emerging critical reading tradition is anticipated in the work of D.H. Lawrence. Lawrence prophesied the putrefaction of the Song's orchards long before the professional biblical scholar emerged suspicious onto the scene. Lawrence's work therefore has a considerable amount to teach us about the way love is constructed in the poem's world—and how it might be deconstructed.

I begin with a survey of the scholarly attention already devoted to the Song's food imagery.

L'Entrée

In her 2001 Semeia article ‘The Food of Love’, Athalya Brenner argues that while the Song is a pointedly vegetarian venture (and therefore laudably bloodless by general biblical standards), the poem nevertheless maintains direct equivalencies between certain sorts of produce and certain sorts of gendered identity. ⁷ These smack more than a little of patriarchal power: the Song's female protagonist is primarily associated with fruit and with the land that produces it while the male is an eater of that bounty—a devourer of women. Carey Ellen Walsh reads the Song's food imagery too, though she is a good deal more optimistic. Walsh focuses on the nourishing and sustaining qualities of the Song's sex, contending that it consciously trades against the Edenic command to be ‘fruitful’ and multiply. The poem replies therefore to the patriarch's pressure to sire offspring with a kind of sexual frivolity, inverting Genesis's sense of what constitutes legitimate ‘fruit’. For Walsh, the orality of the sexual encounter in the Song of Songs thereby deflates the usual phallocentrism of biblical sexual discourse. The phallic desire to penetrate the vaginal opening is answered by an oral sexuality; its sex is not an act of bodily infiltration but of mutual consumption, opening fixed to opening: ‘your kisses are better than wine’ (1.2). ⁸

In a monograph devoted to queering the relationship between food and sex in the Bible, Ken Stone expresses broad assent to Walsh's reading, ⁹ though he also makes the point that the social proscriptions that attach to both food and sex make the issue more complicated than we might immediately think when following either Brenner or Walsh's work. Food cannot simply be supportive of or antagonistic to love because the social coding of both food and sex moves around a great deal in culture. Sometimes sex is ‘fucking’; sometimes snacking is lavish. Moreover, sex and eating necessarily relate to the way we formulate our senses of self and identity and can therefore attach to identity quite differently in different contexts. Like Probyn, Stone understands eating and sex as activities that work at the borders that ‘we’ police around ‘our'selves. ¹⁰ They each combine a kind of psychic danger with a subconscious pleasure: the pleasure derived from breaking the body's borders and the fear of losing cohesion through that breach. The coterminous sensations of danger and pleasure underwrite the relationship of the lovers in the Song of Songs, Stone suggests. The poem's ecstatic exclamations and its furtive toying with the numerous social structures that would seem to want to hinder the lovers’ union (cf. 2.14; 5.7; 8.1–2, 8) replay these contradictory impulses. Sexuality is not ‘good’ or ‘bad’ in the poem by virtue of the food through which it is conjured. Sex and food establish socially conditioning borders in the poem on the one hand, and, on the other, they provide imagery that transgresses those borders, sometimes most graphically and sensationally.

One pattern that emerges in these works is the common use of food as a kind of interpretative schema. The type of foodstuff in play allows for a standardized decoding of the Song's love, which is imagined to be operating somewhere behind the poem's heavily laden table. Food has become a kind of Derridean supplement. It makes up for the lack of literally rendered ‘sex acts’ in the Song by providing a code through which we can understand them and a mask for their absence. The Song's sexual politics thereby becomes egalitarian or patriarchal by virtue of its use of foodstuffs (vegetarian or carnivorous respectively).

However, it would be more accurate to say that the ideas of food and sex are coterminous in the poem. When the male lover imagines his girlfriend as a fruit-laden tree and himself as a sampler of her delectable breasts, for example, he is neither sexualizing the act of eating nor imaging fruit-flavoured sex:

Within the confines of its own signifying economy, the poem creates the poetic motion of sexual intimacy through the imbibing of wine and fruit, and it fashions the sensory experience of this ‘meal’ through the power of a sexual register. Strictly speaking, food is not garnishing sex here. Nor is coitus flavouring the bounties of the poem. Eating is a modality through which sexual intimacy comes into being as a poetic concept in the Song while sex is the poem's only way of discussing the sensory experiences of eating. Each idea is a re-organized substrate of the other. ¹⁶

Indeed, an issue that is seldom acknowledged in the scholarship around the Song's food is that what is at stake in the relevant passages of the Song is not food so much as the activity of eating it. It becomes easy to conflate the two in analysis when in fact they are not quite equivalent. If food stands in for the lovers' bodies, then understanding the sexual politics of the Song on its culinary terms would require a close reading not of the nature of the food (meat, fruit, or liquid) but of how the text models the act of its consumption. In other words, by fixating on the nature of the foodstuff we have created a value system of eating in the poem (vegetarian: romantic; carnivorous: patriarchal) without ever considering eating in the text on its own terms. Naturally, the aforementioned scholarship does not ignore eating entirely. Brenner's material carries a critique on the ‘devouring’ of women and Stone's focus on the transgression of bodily borders recognizes the dynamic in-process nature of the Song's bodies. But both stop short of providing for eating the same detailed interpretative model that we have for types of fare in the text.

Eating is after all as much of a focus in the text as the foodstuffs themselves, if not more so. In 5.1 honeycomb is not described nor used as a point of reference. It is ‘eaten’ (‭יתלכא‬), just as wine and milk are ‘drunk’ (‭יתיתש‬). As readers we are exhorted to ‘eat our fill’, as the NIV renders ‭ורכשו ותש‬. ¹⁷ In ch. 2, it is ‘taste’ that is again at issue, or more specifically the impact of the food on the palate (‭דח‬ is used both here and in 7.9). Indeed, we only know what type of fruit the woman has consumed because she mentions the tree. The object itself is never a focus of the poem's attention. A few verses later, she is to be revived by partaking of apples and raisins (2.5). ¹⁸ The lover is not just like milk and honey (4.11)—they issue from under her tongue, presumably turning her kisses into light, saccharine meals.

A possible exception to this trend might be those references to food which coincide with the description of the woman's body: the pomegranate cheek-cum-temple (4.3); the belly of wheat and the vulva that ‘never lacks wine’ (7.2). These stand-alone images are more obviously depicted as ‘items’ than as vehicles to display sexual consumption. But of course as long as we view these objects as food we are keeping the idea of eating them in view, particularly in chs. 4, 6 and 7, where these foodstuffs are used to ‘build’ lovers. For this apparently strange poetic technique of creating figures out of foodstuffs is what we ‘really’ do every day to manufacture and sustain our own bodies at the cellular level. In a very material sense, pomegranates, wheat sheaves and blended wines do become cheeks and bellies and vulvas and affect. The Song has simply substituted poetic rumination for metabolic chemistry.

Fiona Black has seized the poetic potential of bodily process in the Song more fully. In her book The Artifice of Love, Black deals at length with the idea of the Song's lovers as ‘grotesque’ figures, beings in process. Speaking of the bodily depictions in Song of Songs 4, 5, 6 and 7, Black points out that the edibility of these substances is only one small part of their poetic potential anyway. A pomegranate might signify via many of its aspects: scent, taste, colour, or even the particular way it lapses into putrefaction. ¹⁹ Readers will tend to decide for themselves and indeed Black is exercised by the way that potentially unsavoury connotations have been weeded out of interpretation, even when the Song is being obviously ‘grotesque’ (viz. comments about sheep who have not miscarried [4.2]; baths of expressed milk [4.5; 5.12]; sexual fluids [4.15; 5.2, 5]). She terms this pattern a ‘Hermeneutic of Compliment’. ²⁰ It can be seen almost everywhere. ²¹

Overall, Black argues that the romance of the poem is something of an ‘artifice’, a readerly production that extends from the critic's love affair with the text rather than from the poetry itself. Like the bodies depicted in the Song, the poetic corpus is not closed but in process, exceeding itself. It draws in the critic until a love for the poetry becomes mistaken for a love within the poem. What I wish to advance below is a reading that follows on fairly directly from Black's argument. What I want to focus on here, however, is one particular set of bodily ‘process’ (that of digestion and excretion), as a broader, almost philosophical category that reengages with the mechanics of the text and the process of reading. My argument is that the Song's relationship with the ‘real’ world beyond the edge of the page is not necessarily one that facilitates connection. It also invokes considerable separations and excretions. One can see in it a vision of love as a road to isolation. One can therefore see in the Song's interpretative history a kind of loneliness that has been mistaken for love. ²² Eating, digestion and excretion are processes bound up with both connection/assimilation and with isolation/excretion and as such they open up the Song to such a reading. Shifting our focus from the Song's food to its dynamics of eating, therefore, is key.

Le Sorbet

One theorist who has written insightfully on the practice of eating is Noelle Châtelet. In her volume Le Corps à corps culinaire (cited also by Probyn), Châtelet highlights the bodily transformations that eating entails and the way it sanctions a form of social amnesia:

Châtelet's middle-class mid-week fayre reminds us that eating is not merely a mouth-concept, as Stone and Walsh's readings of the ‘border’ I think imply, nor is it simply a symbolic quantity that can be directly translated into gender (as Brenner models for us, and which Stone rightly cautions us against). Eating is a visceral motion that makes life and discourse possible. Importantly, the enabling function of this ‘motion’ is hidden by a socially conditioned amnesia. We choose to forget that our talking or walking, our writing or painting or singing is food that has been translated by the machinery of the body into life. Earlier I noted Brenner's criticism of the ‘consuming male’ who eats the woman in the Song of Songs. Châtelet's bodies, whatever their gender, can never be merely machines of consumption in this way. They are necessarily machines of production too, producing gestures and emotions, ‘intelligency or stupidity’ through the translation of food into a language called life. Indeed, Châtelet is clear that eating is a kind of language. It is, she says, ‘an actual dialogue between the eater and the world, a type of privileged and symbolic language’. ²⁴ Literal language produces meaning when it is consumed; it establishes identities; its political potential is forgotten because of its quotidian nature. So too with eating.

Châtelet provides us with a model for understanding the Song's eating that goes beyond a mere register of synthesis through mutual ingestion. She instead presents eating as a language of transformation and translation, eating as an exercise in ‘pretending to forget’.

Le Plat Principal

This way of understanding eating has particular resonance with the Song, which boasts the same features. The poem is engaged constantly in acts of transformation and translation and the history of its interpretation has been marked by readerly amnesia. How do these broad features of the text intersect with its focus on eating?

Let us take Châtelet's two ideas in turn. The Song's protagonists are always transmogrifying each other and their world into something else. On reflection, this will to transform one's lover seems a curious mode of expressing desire. Why will what you love the most into the shape of something lesser? What kind of desire does that express? This conjuring seems yet more strange when we consider that the lovers often turn each other into food to be consumed. Their language of poetic transformation thus becomes a transformative ‘language’ in Châtelet's sense, the lover becoming fuel for the body to be transformed, ‘translated’ again into action and affect and, one presumes, into excrements.

One might claim that this talk of excrements is a little far-fetched, but such an objection actually brings us back to the issue of readerly amnesia. As we have seen, when biblical scholars speak about food in the text they make a range of logical assumptions about nourishment and the biological processes associated with it: consumption, comingling; the violence (or otherwise) of preparing meals; biting, tasting, and so forth. Along with Châtelet, scholars tend to forget about a variety of other processes which they could infer along the same lines, equally connected with eating and equally secondary to the text: excretion, digestion, putrefaction, the threat of death which each meal staves off, etcetera. Black identifies in Song scholarship the trope of the Hermeneutic of Compliment, a mode of reading by which scholars assume a beauty for the poem's female protagonist and read out of its metaphors anything that might conflict with that view, no matter how ambiguous or bizarre the imagery might be. Something similar seems to hold of the lovers' erotic diet. Scholars are perfectly happy to presume certain bodily functions for the characters based on their consumption of food but not others. Why? Usually this is because the ignobilities of the human digestive system do not easily attach to one's fundamental assumptions about what the poem is supposed to depict. However, once we adopt the relatively simple exegetical principle advocated by Châtelet of refusing to read out of food its nature as a single nodal point in a necessarily interdependent matrix of social and biological processes, a wider set of questions emerges.

For instance, there remains a series of interpretative problems around the politics of absorption and metabolism in the text. When the male lover transforms the woman into a tree in order to climb her and drink the juices of her vinous breasts or when he poetically transforms her fluids into natural sugars that issue from under the tongue, his readers are not simply presented with sexual mingling. That is, we are not merely confronted with one liquid body merged with another. Instead, the woman has penetrated the male lover. His body has become openable and the traditional invasive structures of heteronormative sex have been momentarily reversed. This surely has implications for feminist readings of the text (and not necessarily favourable ones). For now, however, let us merely follow the morsel downwards.

The consumed woman is absorbed by the male. Absorption is after all the very point of a drive like hunger, which commentators understand to be in view in the text as proxy for sexual appetite. So while it would be convenient to imagine the eaten woman simply disappearing, he has in fact absorbed her, appropriated her as a mode of staging himself as a bodily subject. Masticated, vigorously ground down, ‘gliding over scarlet lips’ (7.10), the woman becomes part of this cannibal man's very substance. In one sense, the female protagonist is in these instances a huge, poetic teat for her lover, whose strength, vigour, growth and energy are entirely provided for by the nourishing qualities of the woman's apparently limitless form. After all, there is no eating in the poem that does not coincide with sex. ²⁵ We might say therefore that the edible female body of the poem is only ever the eating male body waiting to happen. The female body is always waiting to be assimilated into ‘energy, intelligency or stupidity, in short a series of social and affective gestures’ which we read forgetting ‘or pretending to forget’ that the wheat and wine consumed/consummated the page before serve only to make the male's body a function of the female's destruction. She is absorbed and translated into male action by virtue of his diet of lovemaking.

The poem acknowledges only four types of male bodily activity: more eating, sleeping, moving away from the half-eaten woman, and, most crucially, speaking—speaking her body into being again so he can return to feast on it in the following paragraph. ²⁶ The Song's love affair is veritably vampyric in that sense. Or else it is subtly bulimic, locked into a cycle of bingeing and purging. Which is to say, á la Black, that the notion of ‘love as eating’ can be read as discomforting, saddening, and dangerous simply by modulating the logic of our reading.

It is perhaps too simple to assume then that the female bodies of the Song are symbols of sexual gratification because they are ‘devoured’. The Song's female protagonist images what the male must destroy in order to constitute himself and to maintain that constitution. Indeed, I would suggest this brings us perhaps closer to Julia Kristeva's theorizing of abjection ²⁷ than the kind of danger/delight reading proposed by Stone; the woman must be consumed in order to constitute the male, whose masculine identity is made present precisely through the action of continually translating feminine identity through her entry into the male.

La Salade et le Fromage

However, the male's eating is not the whole story. The female protagonist is also sustained by sexual cuisine at several points in the text, though these episodes are admittedly more ambiguous. For instance, when the female lover is ‘faint with love’ in the wine house ²⁸ of 2.4–5, and her lover must feed her with apples and support her with raisins to ward off the sickness, are we supposed to understand the woman's love-sickness to stem from a lack of amorous attention (resolved by ‘eating’ her lover)? Or is she sick from too much love? In other words, is she fed to survive her overwhelming love or to manage her loneliness? Perhaps it makes little difference in the end. For in either case the food does not signal the sexual mingling we have been led to expect. Instead it underlines the lovers' individuality and physical distinctness; food either sustains the woman through her loneliness as an isolated subject or else it sustains her by means of a devouring of her consort: one body used up in stabilizing the identity of the other, as we saw above.

Brenner argues that there is exegetical significance in the fact that the female tends only to taste the male (‘his fruit was sweet to my taste’, 2.3; ‘his mouth [‭רבד‬] is delicious’, 5.16). This makes the woman's a less violent appropriation of her lover's body, certainly, but even the action of timorous sampling is fundamentally political. As Georg Simmel once observed, the taste bud is an instrument of final ownership: ‘as the morsel is going into my mouth, pricking up my tongue and taste buds, and then sliding down on its route to digestion and finally defecation, you cannot be anything more than a witness’. ²⁹ Even tasting is an act of ultimate exclusion.

In fact, we could pick up Brenner's examples of the ‘tasting’ in 2.3 on precisely these terms. ‘Like the apple tree among the trees of the wood, so is my beloved among the sons. I sat down under his shadow with great delight, and his fruit was sweet to my taste.’ When the Song's female lover compares the male to an apple tree among the trees of the forest and sits in his shade to ‘taste’ the sweetness of his fruit, she is at once picking her lover out from among the other trees in the wood, and, also, singling herself out as the sole beneficiary of his harvest. In picking him and tasting his fruit, she precludes both the other trees from mingling with her body and the rest of the world from sampling him. Taste becomes intimacy but intimacy in turn becomes exclusion. For Brenner this may be ‘just’ or ‘only’ taste, but tasting involves turning the tongue into an instrument of ownership as effective and declamatory as the phallus that Walsh and Stone seek to displace. The sense of exclusion is especially difficult to ignore since none of the nutritional, utilitarian nuances of ‘eating’ are retained by the verse. ‘His fruit is sweet to my taste’, she says, with a curiously redundant first-person possessive. What these observations amount to is the sense that food attaches to the establishment of the self in the text. This politics of self emerges precisely because it carries with it the enduring power of rejection, however adept we have become at reading it out of our treatments of the text.

Leaving issues of metabolism to one side and returning to Châtelet's functionalist approach to eating, I would argue that there also remains a question for Song scholars about excrement. For surely something should be said about how the poem's characters treat the possibility of atrophy and decay (which the very notion of physical sustenance betrays), or else something should be said about how we are to understand the curious erasure of deterioration and by-product from the Bible's vision of love.

As I have already suggested, the lovers' principal mode of survival as a poetic subject in the text is to transform their partners into food so they can consume them and then secondarily change them into poetry. This movement replaces in the Song the usual linear transformation of foodstuff into faeces. Poetry is the unassimilable remainder of each lover's relationship with the other, a byproduct which they churn out in streams with decided regularity. This recasts those of us who consume the text as readers in some gruesome ways. Not only must we consume the poetic excrementa of the lovers, we must forget that we are doing so in order than we can transform it into ‘love’—another sort of selective ingestion to be sure, and one that fits the agrarian theme of the text quite nicely. We consume the poem's love/shit recognizing ‘love’ as the fertilizer, for want of a better word, that fed the creative mind behind the poem when in fact that transaction could be easily reversed: love is what we produce as a side effect of the poetry, a kind of excrementa erotica. ³⁰

These observations apply most obviously to the Song's overtly gastronomic passages; the lovers eat, consume and excrete poetry. But the same observation could be made of the poem as a whole. Even when the fruit and the pulses have been put away and the lovers are talking of locked doors and city streets or the wilderness, the processes of consumption, (re)production and excretion are always in play. It is the modus of the characters' relationship. They speak/produce, listen/consume, speak/excrete. This feature of the text owes more than a little to its being exclusively structured around direct speech. Speaking, producing, reading, consuming are in the end all mistaken by the text, or its readers, as equating to love. This brings the Song back into contact with Châtelet's sense of eating as a kind of language, and to Probyn's sense of sex as a kind of meal. Writing, reading, loving and eating coincide in the text as we read. This process produces poetic characters through a series of excremental transactions that as readers we ‘pretend to forget’.

Le Dessert

One place where these concerns connect most viscerally is in the middle period of D.H. Lawrence's poetry, in particular his 1923 volume Birds, Beasts and Flowers. It is a book that picks up an array of biblical texts and tropes. ³¹ The poem ‘Figs’ considers Eve in Eden; in ‘Snake’ we meet the demonic; ‘Grapes’ addresses Noah's drunkenness; in ‘Almond Blossom’ we visit Gethsemane; in ‘The Ass’, Mary and Joseph flee to Egypt; and the eponymous beasts of Lawrence's title are those of the four evangelists, who each receive a composition—as does Bibbles, a tellingly named dog who returns to his own vomit. Predictably, the volume is not what one would call confessional in its tone. Sandra Gilbert calls Birds, Beasts and Flowers a ‘sophisticated and subversive engagement’ with biblical themes. ³² I am interested here in Lawrence's poem ‘Medlars and Sorb-Apples’ for that reason.

Sorbs and Medlars are fruits that must be allowed to begin to enter the first stages of decay before they become edible. Accordingly, the poem uses images of rot, putrefaction and ‘autumnal excrementa’ to explore sexual relationships outside the register of bucolic springtime, with which readers will no doubt be more familiar.

Critics tend to associate ‘Medlars and Sorb-Apples’ with the garden of Eden because of its two lovers and its strong sexual overtones, and indeed because of the interpretative bias towards Genesis that runs through interpretations of Birds, Beasts and Flowers. ³³ But the poem perhaps has a more direct relationship with the Song of Songs, a poem whose imagery is easily mistaken for that of Genesis 1–3. The Song begins with a simple direct declaration of love in the second person: ‘Let him kiss me with the kisses of his mouth, for your lovemaking is better than wine!’ (1.2). ‘Medlars’ too opens in direct declaration (‘I love you, rotten/delicious rottenness’) and with an opening ‘kiss’ (‘I love to suck you out from your skins’). As with the Song, this kiss quickly descends into the plummy notes of viniculture (‘…the same flavour as Syracusan muscat wine/or vulgar Marsala’). As the poem goes on we see that ‘Medlars’ is preoccupied with the pointedly sexual relationship of a primordial couple rather than with the twin issues of rebellion and deity (that we find in ‘Figs’, for example) and that Lawrence's page is filled not just with mythic gardens but also with punnets of suggestive fruit, ‘nut kernels’ (cf. Song 6.11), and ‘spasm[s] of farewell’ (cf. ‘if you see my lover, tell him I am sick with love’, 5.8). These play out a subversion of the Song's images rather more obviously than they recall Eden's. Indeed, we know Lawrence thought of the Song in exactly this way at around this time in his life. In ‘The Overtone’ (from St Mawr and Other Stories, 1925), Mrs Renshaw tells a ‘bitter psalm’ that directly inverts the Song's bounties until they become ‘little abortions of growth’: sex made abject. ³⁴

Abjection is certainly Lawrence's focus in ‘Medlars’:

Answering his own question as the stanzas go on, Lawrence sets up an opposition between love and the usual tropes of growth, unity or fruitfulness. Instead, he focuses on love's power to institute a kind of purifying decay. Just as rotting fruit sloughs off its flesh to reveal the ‘nut kernel’ inside, so sexual intimacy creates a ‘wonderful’ isolation in its aftermath. In other words, what ‘Medlars’ seems to explore is the moment after orgasm when one returns to oneself vividly aware of being trapped behind one's own eyes—separate after all. Lawrence discovers in the emblem of the rotting medlar a sense of sex as a process of abject excretion that defines and overwhelms the emotional highs of sexual pleasure.

Each ‘new partner’ brings with them an intimacy that ends in sudden estrangement—‘a new parting/a new unfusing’—which in turn brings a growing sense of intoxicating isolation. Figured as a process of decay, love thus becomes a means of finding a pure self that is ‘ever more exquisite, distilled in separation’ like the fruit stone left after the fibrillar flesh has rotted away. As with the Sorb Apple, each putrefying moment hastens the ripeness of the true prize: the discrete and lonely seed/self ³⁵

In English vernacular it is common to speak of rotting food having ‘turned’ and the image of the turn in fact takes on particular importance in ‘Medlars’ through Lawrence's invocation of Orpheus and Eurydice, who appear amid all this rotting fruit. In Greek mythology, Orpheus leads his lover back from the underworld to freedom, having bargained for life with Hades. Glancing back at the last moment, he breaks the terms of his bargain and loses her again to the world of the dead. His turn towards her turns her back to the underworld. Lawrence re-imagines Orpheus's turn in the second half of the poem. Leaving Eurydice at the gates of the Underworld, Lawrence's Orpheus basks in the moment of blissful separation, what he calls ‘the ego sum of Dionysos/The sono io [it's me] of perfect drunkenness’. In her excellent treatment of Lawrence's use of Orpheus, Helen Sword describes ‘Medlars’ on these terms as celebrating the ‘the known, egoistic depths of the self’. ³⁶ Lawrence has fermented the turned fruit of the Song's garden and combined it with the politics of the orphic turn to identify love and sex as sites of virtual excretion.

Naturally, Lawrence is not refashioning or reimagining love in ‘Medlars’ any more than he is challenging the basic properties of fruit and vegetables. He is instead calling attention to the abject qualities of the natural world as a way of foregrounding the disquieting but essential obverse of human sexual relationships. Lonesome selves are established by orgasm just as they are with eating. Lawrence realizes the connectedness of these processes in the Song. In particular, his poem re-frames the way we see the Song's food-sex imagery in order to give attention to its shadow side, the aspects of its vision of love where all is not quite as it first seems.

For the Song might be seen as being predicated on a series of ‘deaths’ very much in the vein of ‘Medlars’. Indeed, even the most ardent romantic reader of the poem would recognize the presence of death and decay in the poem. The most prominent appearance of death is of course in 8.1, ‘love is strong as death, its jealousy as unyielding as the underworld’. Most often in scholarship the tone of this verse has meant that the poem's allusions to death have been relativized within a more comforting vision of an imperial love ascendant. Death is present to the extent that it is shown to be weaker than love in the end. As Cheryl Exum notes,

Similarly, Marvin Pope has discussed at length the idea that the poem as a whole is an active response to the fear of death, which aims to hold it at bay by invoking a faultless love. ³⁸

The Song is not perhaps as universally successful in holding atrophy at bay as commentators suggest, however. Everywhere Lawrencian decomposition is present. The lovers have aged (8.1) and live in a world where further aging is possible (8.8). Skin can become damaged (1.6) and the lovers can become exhausted or ill (2.5; 5.8). We should note that these maladies tend to set in precisely because of love. Perhaps love has not withstood atrophy, then. Perhaps it is not ‘as strong as death’ so much as adept at rhetorically colonizing death's powers, claiming death's effects as its own. We could understand the plethora of ripe fruit we have already sampled from the poem to suggest decay too, ripeness being only one more socially constructed stage en route to putrefaction—just as eating, in fact, is an act of staving off our own self-confessed degenerations through the appropriation of the rot of some comestible or other, which keeps our own at bay.

I would argue that even those aspects of the text that seem to eschew death more successfully are in thrall to it. We might be tempted to think that in the lovers' universality, in the timeless circularity of the poem, in the aforementioned refrain of 8.1, the text is more or less effective in conjuring a deathless world. But such a world only serves to highlight the social function of the poem as a reaction to the inevitability of death, and heightens our sense that someone has tried to render an evergreen world because death inevitably reigns beyond it. Like the subject of Lawrence's poem, the biblical Song has created sexual relationships to distil itself, to isolate itself, to separate itself out from the world of death as a protected space. But as its lovers' idealized relationship marks out the poem's world, we see the Song as a text intoxicated by its own loneliness, to bastardize Lawrence, lying separated in the midst of ‘decaying, frost-cold leaves’. Like Lawrence's Orpheus, the Song is blissfully alone, having banished death and grown intoxicated on the ‘ego sum’ the ‘sono io’ of its turn away from reality. In the end it is not the lapsing of romanticism we find in Lawrence's vision of the Song but a restatement of the bleak politic that necessarily underwrites the kind of absolute love commentators encourage us to find there.

Le Café et le Digestif

Needless to say, in abjecting death the Song of Songs establishes itself as a discrete deathless world. But it cannot ever be rid of this inaugural negation. Its world of life, and food and consumption, hints always at a decay the poem cannot name. Thus reading the poem becomes a movement by which we distil an ever more isolated readerly identity for ourselves, repeatedly merging with the text's vision of love and then ‘coming to’ in the real world like a lover sated. We continually ‘pretend to forget’ that what the text aims to persuade us of is our loneliness, and the inevitable failure of the kind of love it espouses is what makes the poem necessary in the first place. Lawrence's version of the Song's economy of consumption and excretion is not subversive at all, perhaps, but a more honest appraisal of its politics. As a text it wants to be alone, preserving the same distilled self-identification as we find in ‘Medlars’. For us to read that ‘love is strong as death…as unyielding as the underworld’ is to realise that the poem itself is, to quote Lawrence's inversion of the sentiment, living a process of ‘going down the strange lanes of Hell, more and more intensely alone’—like a morsel swallowed. Reading, we situate the poem as a kind of excretion from the real world and we pretend to forget that we in turn have been excreted from its vision of love, itself a consuming, orphic affair with the Self.

Jamque vale!