The subject of “desire” is a well-known topic discussed among scholars studying the Song of Song and other ancient love poetry. Simply defined, desire indicates a lack that someone searches to fill. In this case, lack can be for anything. However, in love poetry it is linked to the fulfillment of intimacy and sexual desire.

Carey Ellen Walsh in, “Exquisite Desire: Religion, The Erotic, and the Song of Songs” has an apt description of desire. She describes it by contrasting the concept of “wanting” and “getting.” Since desire presupposes a previous experience with something that is currently lacking, it focuses on wanting that experience (p. 22).  Walsh’s succinct description is that “Desire is memory of an experienced pleasure. Without the previous taste, it is wish or curiosity: it is out of focus.” She continues by saying, “Desire has content, and therefore pain to it, in that acute knowledge of just what is missing. Desire, unlike fantasy, is born in the previous enjoyment of a pleasure and then is honed by the absence of that pleasure.” (p. 23)

This explanation of “desire” is helpful in understanding the language, rhetorical strategy, imagery and tone of love poetry. Attention to desire helps one to determine how lovers describe their desire as well as the object of that desire. The love poem below is a description of a man who is lovesick. Apparently, he has been separated from his beloved and longs to see her again. The circumstances of this separation are not revealed. However, the language of his desire for his beloved comes through quite passionately.

The above picture represents two lovers whose desire for each other is so strong that nothing can separate it. The chains represent an indestructible bond between the two. It also represents the intensity of mutual desire after two lovers reunited after having been separated. 

                                  (STANZA FROM AN EGYPTIAN LOVE POEM)

Seven (days) to yesterday I have not seen the sister,

            And a sickness has invaded me.

My body has become heavy,

            Forgetful of my own self.

If the chief of physicians come to me,

            My heart is not content (with) their remedies;

The lector priests, no way (out) is in them:

            My sickness will not be probed.

To say to me: “Here she is!” is what will revive me;

            Her name is what will lift me up;

The going in and out of her messengers

            Is what will revive my heart.

More beneficial to me is the sister than any remedies;

            She is more to me than the collected writings.

My health is her coming in from outside:

            When (I) see her, then (I) am well.

If she opens her eye, my body is young (again);

            If she speaks, then I am strong (again);

When I embrace her, she drives evil away from me—

            But she has gone forth from me for seven days!

(Taken from James Pritchard’s, “Ancient Near Eastern Texts Relating to the Old Testament”)