Song of Songs

From a piece well worth reading in its entirety (https://mubi.com/notebook/posts/terrence-malick-theologian-the-intimidating-exhilarating-religiosity-of-the-tree-of-life-and-to-the-wonder):

To the Wonder, true to its ancient source, is a love song. Its narrative logic is specifically poetic. Its structure is built carefully upon a cadence of clear, beautiful rhymes and faint yet significant echoes; its entrances and exits, its tender highs and lows of romantic and spiritual feeling, are as perfectly timed and breathlessly sustained as the lovers' back-and-forth in the Song of Songs. The mood of the film shifts mercurially as presence (the ebullience and unity of sexual consummation, the tenderness of shared companionship) shifts to absence: “In my bed by night I sought him whom my soul loveth: I sought him, and I found him not,” laments the woman in the Song of Songs, “I will rise, and will go about the city: in the streets and the broad ways I will seek him whom my soul loveth: I sought him, and I found him not” (3:1-2).