Desire is about wanting more than it is about getting. It is the hunger that highlights the food; the patience that heightens the faith; the arousal that anticipates the sex. The salt of a lover's lips or the sweet juice of grapes is not just pleasurable anymore: with desire, they become exquisite. Desire is the discipline to live on that edge between wanting and satisfaction. It is not for the timid or the fickle. [...]

Yearning itself may even come to be experienced as a pleasure. The Song is concerned with the provocative question of whether the exquisite sensation of wanting another could surpass in any realistic sense the pleasure of actual consummation. The surprising claim that it cann does seem to be the premise of the song, which stays focused on the experience of yearning, not its relief.


-Carey Ellen Walsh, Exquisite Desire: Religion, the Erotic, and the Song of Songs