When poets celebrate the ceremonies about the May pole they may not know that this celebration is related to early phallic worship. When Æschylus wrote his play of Prometheus stealing the fire, or Milton used the Biblical material of Eve tempted by the serpent, they were probably ignorant of the sexual associations of fire and the serpent in ancient times. But their own works thus become symbolical. Shelley, for example, used the metaphor of the snake quite often, and one of the best known passages in his works is the description of the fight of the eagle and the serpent in _The Revolt of Islam_. He often referred to himself also, as the snake. Yet he may not have been aware there was an unconscious connection between his interest in free love and the symbol of the serpent. The part played by symbolism in love poetry is seen especially in _The Song of Songs_. To us moderns and occidentals many of the comparisons and symbolical representations seem very strange, but they had their origin not in the poet's own conceits but in a historic use of the language. This most celebrated of all love poems fairly swarms with sensuous symbolic images. It proves that early man saw lascivious suggestions everywhere in the landscapes, in flowers, rocks, trees, country, city, animals. The speech of our ancestors was sexualised. The beloved in the poem, which is a dialogue between her and her lover, is like a wall with towers (the breasts); she is a vineyard; she is in the clefts of the rock and the hidden hollow of the cliff. She has eyes like doves, her hair is like a flock of straying goats, her teeth like a flock of washed ewes, her lips like a scarlet thread, her temples like pomegranate, her neck like the tower of David builded with turrets and hung with shields, her breasts like twin fawns feeding among the lilies. She is a closed garden, a shut up spring, a sealed fountain. The roundings of her thighs are like the link of a chain, her navel is like a round empty goblet, her belly like a heap of wheat set among lilies, her eyes like the pools of Heshbon, her nose like the tower of Lebanon. The lover is like an apple tree among the trees of the wood; he is a young hart. His head is as fine gold, his eyes are like doves, his cheeks are a bed of spices, as a bank of sweet herbs; his lips are lilies dropping myrrh, his hands are as rods of gold set with beryl, his body is polished ivory overlaid with sapphires, his legs are pillars of marble set in sockets of gold; his aspect like Lebanon, chosen like the cedar.