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59-643: The term originated from the Biblical Song of Songs ( 7:4 ) with a different meaning and was later used as an epithet for Mary . In the Christian tradition, the term ivory tower is used as a symbol for noble purity. It originates with the Song of Songs 7:4 ("Your neck is like an ivory tower", Hebrew : מגדל השן , romanized :  miḡdal haš-šên ; in the Hebrew Masoretic text, it

118-437: A Greek poet who wrote in the first half of the 3rd century BCE; as a result of these conflicting signs, speculation ranges from the 10th to the 2nd centuries BCE, with the language supporting a date around the 3rd century. Other scholars are more skeptical about the idea that the language demands a post-exilic date. Debate continues on the unity or disunity of the book. Those who see it as an anthology or collection point to

177-536: A phrase that follows an idiomatic construction commonly found in Scriptural Hebrew to indicate the object's status as the greatest and most beautiful of its class (as in Holy of Holies ). The work is also referred to as the "Song of Solomon", meaning the song 'of', 'by', 'for', or '[dedicated] to' Solomon. The poem proper begins with the woman's expression of desire for her lover and her self-description to

236-529: A rather negative flavor today, the implication being that specialists who are so deeply drawn into their fields of study often can't find a lingua franca with laymen outside their "ivory towers" . In Andrew Hodges' biography of the University of Cambridge scientist Alan Turing , he discusses Turing's 1936–38 stay at Princeton University and writes that "[t]he tower of the Graduate College

295-495: A royal wedding procession. Solomon is mentioned by name, and the daughters of Jerusalem are invited to come out and see the spectacle. The man describes his beloved: Her eyes are like doves, her hair is like a flock of goats, her teeth like shorn ewes, and so on from face to breasts. Place-names feature heavily: her neck is like the Tower of David , her smell like the scent of Lebanon . He hastens to summon his beloved, saying that he

354-416: A single theme", and thus not worthy of canonization. In fact, "there is a tradition that even this book was considered as one to be excluded." It was accepted as canonical because of its supposed authorship by Solomon and based on an allegorical reading where the subject matter was taken to be not sexual desire but God's love for Israel. For instance, the famed first and second century Rabbi Akiva forbade

413-456: A specific mission or athletic ties. Some have criticized the elitism associated with these groups. In certain instances, these ivory-tower universities have received a disproportionate amount of regional and national funding. They also produce a higher proportion of a country's publications and citations. They tend to be overrepresented in top university rankings, such as Academic Ranking of World Universities , QS World University Rankings ,

472-517: A system of ten sephirot emanations, each symbolizing a different attribute of God, comprising both male and female. The Shechina ( indwelling Divine presence) was identified with the feminine sephira Malchut , the vessel of Kingship. This symbolizes the Jewish people, and in the body, the female form, identified with the woman in Song of Songs. Her beloved was identified with the male sephira Tiferet ,

531-591: A threat of iconoclasm ." It is usually said to have begun with the French Symbolist movement and it artificially ends with the Second World War , the beginning and ending of the modernist period are of course arbitrary. Poets like W. B. Yeats (1865–1939) and Rainer Maria Rilke (1875–1926) started in a post-Romantic, Symbolist vein and modernised their poetic idiom after being affected by political and literary developments. Acmeist poetry

590-525: A tradition of lyrical expression, emphasising the personal imagination, culture, emotions, and memories of the poet. For the modernists, it was essential to move away from the merely personal towards an intellectual statement that poetry could make about the world. Even when they reverted to the personal, like T. S. Eliot in the Four Quartets and Ezra Pound in The Cantos , they distilled

649-597: Is derived from the Persian rukh ("chariot"), maybe influenced by the Italian rocca ("fortress"). In early versions of chess, this piece was imagined as conveying and shielding a powerful warrior. Henry James 's last novel, The Ivory Tower , was begun in 1914 and left unfinished at his death two years later. Paralleling James' own dismaying experience of the United States after twenty years away, it chronicles

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708-530: Is found in 7:5) and was included in the epithets for Mary in the sixteenth-century Litany of the Blessed Virgin Mary ("tower of ivory", turris eburnea in Latin), though the title and image were in use long before that, since the 12th-century Marian revival at least. It occasionally appears in art, especially in depictions of Mary in the hortus conclusus . Although the term is rarely used in

767-491: Is its language: Aramaic gradually replaced Hebrew after the end of the Babylonian exile in the late 6th century BCE, and the evidence of vocabulary, morphology , idiom and syntax clearly point to a late date, centuries after King Solomon to whom it is traditionally attributed. It has parallels with Mesopotamian and Egyptian love poetry from the first half of the 1st millennium, and with the pastoral idylls of Theocritus ,

826-452: Is most sweet, he is altogether lovely ( mahamaddim )." In his book Demystifying Islam , Muslim apologist Harris Zafar argues that the last word ( Hebrew : מַחֲּמַדִּים‪‬‪‬ , romanized :  maḥămaddîm , lit.   'lovely'), with the plural suffix "-im" (which is occasionally used to indicate intensity, and is normally understood to do so for both of the adjectives in this verse), expressing respect and greatness (as

885-510: Is not as worthy as the day on which Song of Songs was given to Israel, for all the Writings are holy, but Song of Songs is the Holy of Holies." Other rabbinic scholars who have employed allegorical exegesis in explaining the meaning of Song of Songs are Tobiah ben Eliezer , author of Lekach Tov , and Zechariah ha-Rofé , author of Midrash ha-Hefez . The French rabbi Rashi did not believe

944-546: Is often read from a scroll similar to a Torah scroll in style. It is also read in its entirety by some at the end of the Passover Seder and is usually printed in most Hagadahs . Some Jews have the custom to recite the entire book prior to the onset of the Jewish Sabbath. The literal subject of the Song of Songs is love and sexual longing between a man and a woman, and it has little (or nothing) to say about

1003-402: Is ravished by even a single glance. The section becomes a "garden poem", in which he describes her as a "locked garden" (usually taken to mean that she is chaste). The woman invites the man to enter the garden and taste the fruits. The man accepts the invitation, and a third party tells them to eat, drink, "and be drunk with love". The woman tells the daughters of Jerusalem of another dream. She

1062-413: Is to him. The man describes his beloved; the woman describes a rendezvous they have shared. (The last part is unclear and possibly corrupted.) The people praise the beauty of the woman. The images are the same as those used elsewhere in the poem, but with an unusually dense use of place-names, e.g., pools of Hebron , gate of Bath-rabbim , tower of Damascus , etc. The man states his intention to enjoy

1121-844: The Ketuvim ('writings'), the last section of the Tanakh . It is unique within the Hebrew Bible : it shows no interest in Law or Covenant or the God of Israel, nor does it teach or explore wisdom, like Proverbs or Ecclesiastes —although it does have some affinities to wisdom literature , as the ascription to the 10th-century BCE King of Israel Solomon indicates. Instead, it celebrates sexual love, giving "the voices of two lovers, praising each other, yearning for each other, proffering invitations to enjoy". The two lovers are in harmony, each desiring

1180-562: The Times Higher Education World University Rankings , and the U.S. News & World Report Best Global University Ranking . Song of Songs The Song of Songs ( Biblical Hebrew : שִׁיר הַשִּׁירִים ‎ , romanized:  Šīr hašŠīrīm ), also called the Canticle of Canticles or the Song of Solomon , is a biblical poem , one of the five megillot ("scrolls") in

1239-620: The Bible . Those books reveal an abiding imbalance in the relationship between God and man, ranging from slight to enormous; but reading Songs as a theological metaphor produces quite a different outcome, one in which the two partners are equals, bound in a committed relationship. In modern times the poem has attracted the attention of feminist biblical critics, with Phyllis Trible 's foundational "Depatriarchalizing in Biblical Interpretation" treating it as an exemplary text, and

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1298-477: The allegoric interpretation of Ambrose of Milan , Saint Augustine of Hippo stated that the Song of Songs represents the wedding between Jesus Christ and the Catholic Church, pure and virgin, within an ascetic context. Over the centuries the emphases of interpretation shifted, first reading the Song as a depiction of the love between Christ and Church, the 11th century adding a moral element, and

1357-480: The "Holy One Blessed be He", a central principle in the beneficent heavenly flow of divine emotion. In the body, this represents the male torso, uniting through the sephira Yesod of the male sign of the covenant organ of procreation. Through beneficent deeds and Jewish observance , the Jewish people restore cosmic harmony in the divine realm, healing the exile of the Shechina with God's transcendence, revealing

1416-418: The "daughters of Jerusalem": she insists on her sun-born blackness, likening it to the "tents of Kedar " (nomads) and the "curtains of Solomon". A dialogue between the lovers follows: the woman asks the man to meet; he replies with a lightly teasing tone. The two compete in offering flattering compliments ("my beloved is to me as a cluster of henna blossoms in the vineyards of En Gedi ", "an apple tree among

1475-537: The 12th century understanding of the Bride as the Virgin Mary , with each new reading absorbing rather than simply replacing earlier ones, so that the commentary became ever more complex. These theological themes are not found explicitly in the poem, but they come from a theological reading. Nevertheless, what is notable about this approach is the way it leads to conclusions not found in the overtly theological books of

1534-595: The Bible is that the Song of Songs is an erotic poem, and not an elaborate metaphor. In his commentary for the Anchor Bible Series , Marvin H. Pope quotes scholars who believe that the Song described a fertility cult liturgy, rooted in the fertility cults of the ancient Near Eastern cultures of Mesopotamia and Canaan, as well as their sacred marriage rites and funeral feasts. J. Cheryl Exum wrote: "The erotic desire of its protagonists, everywhere evident in

1593-513: The Feminist Companion to the Bible series edited by Athalya Brenner and Carole Fontaine devoting two volumes to it. The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints specifically rejects the Song of Solomon as inspired scripture. Several Islamic apologists contend that the word mahmaddim in Song of Songs 5:16 mentions Muhammad . Whereas most translators will render the first words of that verse in terms such as "His mouth

1652-520: The Line" (1942), Jarrell asserts that if modern poetry is to survive then poets must come down from the "Ivory Tower" of elitist composition. Jarrell's main thrust is that the rich poetry of the modernist period was over-dependent upon reference to other literary works. For Jarrell the Ivory Tower led modern poetry into obscurity. Writers for Philadelphia 's other newspapers sarcastically referred to

1711-466: The Song are read on Shabbat eve or at Passover , which marks the beginning of the grain harvest as well as commemorating the Exodus from Egypt, to symbolize the love between the Jewish people and their God. Jewish tradition reads it as an allegory of the relationship between God and Israel. The entire Song of Songs in its original Hebrew is read in synagogues during the intermediate days of Passover. It

1770-424: The Song employs a number of literary conventions typical of this didactic literature and that it combines features of both ancient Near Eastern love song and wisdom genres to produce a wisdom literature about romantic love, instructing readers to pursue what she describes as a particular type of 'wise love' relationship, modelled by the lovers of the poem. Likewise, Katharine J. Dell notes a number of Wisdom motifs in

1829-455: The Song of Songs , which are considered the pinnacle of his biblical exegesis . In them, he compares the bride to the soul and the invisible groom to God: the finite soul is incessantly reaching out towards the infinite God and remains continually disappointed in this life due to the failure to achieve ecstatic union with the beloved, a vision which enraptures and can be achieved fully and perfectly only in life after death. Similarly, following

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1888-576: The Song of Songs to be an erotic poem. Song of Songs is one of the overtly mystical Biblical texts for the Kabbalah , which gave an esoteric interpretation on all the Hebrew Bible. Following the dissemination of the Zohar in the 13th century, Jewish mysticism took on a metaphorically anthropomorphic erotic element, and Song of Songs is an example of this. In Zoharic Kabbalah, God is represented by

1947-478: The Song such as parallels between the lovers and the advices and conduct of Woman Wisdom and the Loose Woman of Proverbs , among others. The Song was accepted into the Jewish canon of scripture in the 2nd century CE, after a period of controversy in the 1st century. This period of controversy was a result of many rabbis seeing this text as merely "secular love poetry, a collection of love songs gathered around

2006-510: The Song would have been ritually performed as part of ancient fertility cults and that it is "suggestive of orgiastic revelry". Though scholars have differed in assessing when it was written, with estimates ranging from the 10th to 2nd century BCE, linguistic analysis suggest an origin in the 3rd century. In modern Judaism , the Song is read on the Sabbath during the Passover , which marks

2065-473: The Song, leads me, in conclusion, to the Song's unique contribution to the conceptualization of love in the Bible: its romantic vision of love". The historian and rabbi Shaye J. D. Cohen summarises: Song of Songs [is a] collection of love poems sung by him to her and her to him: [– –] While authorship is ascribed to Solomon in its first verse and by traditionalists, [modern Bible scholarship] argues that while

2124-504: The abrupt shifts of scene, speaker, subject matter and mood, and the lack of obvious structure or narrative. Those who hold it to be a single poem point out that it has no internal signs of composite origins, and view the repetitions and similarities among its parts as evidence of unity. Some claim to find a conscious artistic design underlying it, but there is no agreement among them on what this might be. The question, therefore, remains unresolved. The consensus among contemporary scholars of

2183-453: The beginning of the grain-harvest as well as commemorating the Exodus from Biblical Egypt . Jewish tradition reads it as an allegory of the relationship between God and Israel. In Christianity , it is read as an allegory of Christ and his bride , the Church . There is widespread consensus that, although the book has no plot, it does have what can be called a framework, as indicated by

2242-442: The book may contain ancient material, there is no evidence that Solomon wrote it. [– –] What is a collection of erotic poems doing in the Hebrew Bible? Indeed, some ancient rabbis were uneasy about the book’s inclusion in the canon. Several scholars have also argued that, alongside its condition as love poetry, the Song of Songs also shares a number of features with Wisdom literature . For instance, Jennifer L. Andruska argues that

2301-420: The daughters of Jerusalem, describing her fervent and ultimately successful search for her lover through the night-time streets of the city. When she finds him she takes him almost by force into the chamber in which she was conceived. She reveals that this is a dream, seen on her "bed at night", and ends by again warning the daughters of Jerusalem "not to stir up love until it is ready". The next section reports

2360-463: The effect on a high-minded returning upper-class American of the vulgar emptiness of the Gilded Age . "You seem all here so hideously rich", says his hero. Thus, there are two meanings mixed together: mockery of an absent-minded savant and admiration of someone who is able to devote his or her entire efforts to a noble cause (hence " ivory " , a noble but impractical building material). The term has

2419-594: The essential unity of God. This elevation of the world is aroused from above on the Sabbath, a foretaste of the redeemed purpose of Creation. The text thus became a description, depending on the aspect, of the creation of the world, the passage of Shabbat , the covenant with Israel, and the coming of the Messianic age. " Lecha Dodi ", a 16th-century liturgical song with strong Kabbalistic symbolism, contains many passages, including its opening two words, taken directly from Song of Songs. In modern Judaism, certain verses from

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2478-532: The former headquarters of the establishment Philadelphia Inquirer , a white art deco tower called the Elverson Building , as the "Ivory Tower of Truth." The ivory tower is most often connected with the careers and lifestyles of academics in university and college systems. They have often garnered reputations as elite institutions by joining or creating associations with other universities. In many countries, these institutions aligned themselves with

2537-407: The fruits of the woman's garden. The woman invites him to a tryst in the fields. She once more warns the daughters of Jerusalem against waking love until it is ready. The woman compares love to death and Sheol : love is as relentless and jealous as these two, and cannot be quenched by any force. She summons her lover, using the language used before: he should come "like a gazelle or a young stag upon

2596-423: The links between its beginning and end. Beyond this, however, there appears to be little agreement: attempts to find a chiastic structure have not found acceptance, and analyses dividing the book into units have employed various methods, yielding diverse conclusions. The following indicative schema is from Kugler and Hartin's An Introduction to The Bible : The introduction calls the poem "the song of songs",

2655-461: The more socially engaged Victor Hugo : "Et Vigny, plus secret, Comme en sa tour d'ivoire, avant midi rentrait". [And Vigny, the more secretive, like he was in his ivory tower, returning before midday.] This poetic use of "tour d'ivoire" may have been an allusion to the rook (or castle) in chess, which is another meaning of the French word tour . Chess pieces were often made of ivory. The name Rook

2714-463: The mountain of spices". The poem seems to be rooted in festive performance, and connections have been proposed with the "sacred marriage" of Ishtar and Tammuz . It offers no clue to its author or to the date, place, or circumstances of its composition. The superscription states that it is "Solomon's", but even if this is meant to identify the author, it cannot be read as strictly as a similar modern statement. The most reliable evidence for its date

2773-426: The other and rejoicing in sexual intimacy . Modern scholarship tends to hold that the lovers in the Song are unmarried, which accords with its near ancient Near East context. The women of Jerusalem form a chorus to the lovers, functioning as an audience whose participation in the lovers' erotic encounters facilitates the participation of the reader. Marvin H. Pope, in his commentary, quotes scholars who believe

2832-469: The plural form seems to do in the common Hebrew appellation of God, Elohim ( pl. maiestatus )), should be translated "Muhammad", for the translation "His mouth is most sweet; he is Muhammad". Some Christian Apologists, however, have countered this claim. Excerpts from the book have inspired composers to write vocal and instrumental compositions, including: Modernist poetry Modernist poetry refers to poetry written between 1890 and 1950 in

2891-473: The poem as an object; they emphasised sincerity, intelligence, and the clarity of the poet's vision. In the English-language modernism ends with the turn towards confessional poetry in the work of Robert Lowell and Sylvia Plath , among others. Poets, like Robert Frost , Wallace Stevens , and E. E. Cummings also went on to produce work after World War II. The British Poetry Revival

2950-399: The relationship of God and man; in order to find such a meaning it was necessary to turn to allegory, treating the love that the Song celebrates as an analogy for the love between God and Church. The Christian church's interpretation of the Song as evidence of God's love for his people, both collectively and individually, began with Origen . Saint Gregory of Nyssa wrote fifteen Homilies on

3009-478: The religious sense in modern times, it is credited with inspiring the modern meaning. The first modern usage of "ivory tower" in the familiar sense of an unworldly dreamer can be found in a poem of 1837, "Pensées d'Août, à M. Villemain", by Charles Augustin Sainte-Beuve , a French literary critic and author, who used the term "tour d'ivoire" for the poetical attitude of Alfred de Vigny as contrasted with

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3068-441: The tradition of modernist literature , but the dates of the term depend upon a number of factors, including the nation of origin, the particular school in question, and the biases of the critic setting the dates. The critic/poet C. H. Sisson observed in his essay Poetry and Sincerity that "Modernity has been going on for a long time. Not within living memory has there ever been a day when young writers were not coming up, in

3127-432: The trees of the wood", "a lily among brambles ", while the bed they share is like a forest canopy ). The section closes with the woman telling the daughters of Jerusalem not to stir up love such as hers until it is ready. The woman recalls a visit from her lover in the springtime. She uses imagery from a shepherd's life, and she says of her lover that "he pastures his flock among the lilies". The woman again addresses

3186-438: The use of the Song of Songs in popular celebrations. He reportedly said, "He who sings the Song of Songs in wine taverns, treating it as if it were a vulgar song, forfeits his share in the world to come". However, Rabbi Akiva famously defended the canonicity of the Song of Songs, reportedly saying when the question came up of whether it should be considered a defiling work, "God forbid! [...] For all of eternity in its entirety

3245-466: The works of H.D. , Hardy and Pound , Eliot and Yeats , Williams and Stevens . Around World War II, a new generation of poets sought to revoke the effort of their predecessors towards impersonality and objectivity. Thus, Objectivism was a loose-knit group of second-generation modernists from the 1930s. They include Louis Zukofsky , Lorine Niedecker , Charles Reznikoff , George Oppen , Carl Rakosi , and Basil Bunting . Objectivists treated

3304-436: Was a Russian modernist poetic school, which emerged c.  1911 and to symbols preferred direct expression through exact images. Figures involved with Acmeism include Nikolay Gumilev , Osip Mandelstam , Mikhail Kuzmin , Anna Akhmatova , and Georgiy Ivanov . The Imagism , Anglo-American school from the 1914 proved radical and important, marking a new point of departure for poetry. Some consider that it began in

3363-603: Was a loose wide-reaching collection of groupings and subgroupings during the late 1960s and early 1970s. It was a modernist reaction to the conservative The Movement influenced by Basil Bunting and others. The leading poets included J. H. Prynne , Eric Mottram , Tom Raworth , Denise Riley , and Lee Harwood . Modernism emerged with its insistent breaks with the immediate past, its different inventions, 'making it new' with elements from cultures remote in time and space. The questions of impersonality and objectivity seem to be crucial to Modernist poetry. Modernism developed out of

3422-676: Was an exact replica of Magdalen College , and it was popularly called the Ivory Tower, because of that benefactor of Princeton, the Procter who manufactured Ivory soap ." William Cooper Procter (Princeton class of 1883) was a significant supporter of the construction of the Graduate College, and the main dining hall bears the Procter name. The skylines of Oxford and Cambridge universities, along with many Ivy League universities, are dotted with turrets and spires which are often described as 'Ivory Towers'. In Randall Jarrell 's essay "The End of

3481-423: Was in her chamber when her lover knocked. She was slow to open, and when she did, he was gone. She searched through the streets again, but this time she failed to find him and the watchmen, who had helped her before, now beat her. She asks the daughters of Jerusalem to help her find him, and describes his physical good looks. Eventually, she admits her lover is in his garden, safe from harm, and committed to her as she

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