His mouth is sweetest drink.
The reversion to the mouth does not really violate the vertical movement of the
poem downward because it is a kind of summary at the end: the beloved, having
canvassed her lover’s beauty from head to foot, returns to the physical site of
those kisses that epitomize physical intimacy with him and give her such
gratification. Mamtaqim, “sweetest drink” (which in modern Hebrew means
“candy”), is in biblical usage something sweet that is drunk, as its appearance
in Nehemiah 8:10 makes clear. This links the phrase with the beginning of the
first poem of the Song, in which the lover’s kisses are better than wine: the
first thing she says about her lover in the whole sequence of poems is also
what she says about him, summarizing what she feels, at the end of this poem. (Robert
Alter, The Hebrew Bible, 3 vols. [New York: W. W. Norton & Company,
2019], 3:605)
