s it in present fruition). The last expression is plainly
to be connected with i. 6. But this happiness has not been reached
without a struggle. The speaker has proved herself an impregnable
fortress (ver. 10), and, armed only with her own beauty and innocence,
has been in his eyes as one that found peace. The sense is that, like a
virgin fortress, she has compelled her assailant to leave her in peace.
To these marks of identity with the heroine of ch. i. are to be added
that she appears here as dwelling in gardens, there as a keeper of
vineyards (i. 6, and viii. 13), and that as there it was her brethren
that prescribed her duties, so here she apparently quotes words in which
her brothers, while she was still a child, speculated as to her future
conduct and its reward (viii. 8, 9).

If this analysis of the commencement and close of the book is correct,
it is certain that the poem is in a sense dramatic, that is, that it
uses dialogue and monologue to develop a story. The heroine appears in
the opening scene in a difficult and painful situation, from which in
the last chapter she is happily extricated. But the dramatic progress
which the poem exhibits scarcely involves a plot in the usual sense of
that word. The words of viii. 9, 10 clearly indicate that the
deliverance of the heroine is due to no combination of favouring
circumstances, but to her own inflexible fidelity and virtue.

The constant direction of the maiden's mind to her true love is partly
expressed in dialogue with the ladies of the court (the daughters of
Jerusalem), who have no dramatic individuality, and whose only function
in the economy of the piece is to give the heroine opportunity for a
more varied expression of her feelings. In i. 8 we found them
contemptuous. In chapter iii. they appear to be still indifferent; for
when the heroine relates a dream in which the dull pain of separation
and the uneasy consciousness of confinement and danger in the
unsympathetic city disappear for a moment in imagined reunion with her
lover, they are either altogether silent or reply only by taking up a
festal part song describing the marriage procession of King Solomon
(iii. 6-11), which stands in jarring contrast to the feelings of the
maiden.[5] A second dream (v. 2-8), more weird and melancholy, and
constructed with that singular psychological felicity which
characterizes the dreams of the Old Testament, gains more sympathy, and
the heroine is encouraged to des