Excellence has more to do with attitude than intellect – in particular a willingness to stop striving, and to start patiently listening and responding to our creative king, and to become an empty cup, yearning to be filled.

Our Submissive Female Role
Our role in the creative process must be a submissive, female one, which is why we find the girl here humbly comparing herself to the rose of Sharon, which was a common wild flower. She is not thick skinned, self-willed and uncooperative, like those, whom creativity cannot approach, as typified by the prickly thorns.

Did I Do That?
People who have discovered their creativity often comment, after completing a project, that they feel as if it was not them who did it -- but that it was done for them or through them, and that they really had very little control over the outcome, as with the development of a baby in the womb.

In "Doctor Zhivago", Boris Pasternak describes this passive role of the conscious mind as it works in co-operation with the creative mind, saying that the creative person, in the gestation phase, acts like a mother who "collaborates with the development at the same time involuntarily, and which brings about an event celebrating birth and incarnation".

Author John Fowles said that he even experiences a kind of post-natal depression after completing a novel.

Don't Be Frigid
Michael Goulder suggests that the lily referred to in the "Song" was "singled out not only for its beauty and its scent, but also because of its deep calyx", its cup-like cavity, calling it "a simile which can be taken quite innocently, but which is sufficiently suggestive in phrasing to ensure that a sexual intention is present". perhaps. The "Song", he says, is full of recurrent double entendres.

A flower is attractive and sweet smelling in order to attract the bee, typifying the girl’s willingness and total lack of what might be described as creative frigidity – the rigid, intellectualizing state of mind aptly described by John Fowles in his novel "Mantissa" as a mental chastity belt.

The Humility of Genius
When Rolls-Royce engineer Edward Matchett was commissioned by the “Science Research Council of Great Britain” in the late 1960’s to travel the world studying the nature of the creative mind, he was amazed to find that the working methods of individuals such as Albert Einstein had less to do with intellect than with playfulness, joy and beauty and a quiet and patient reliance on insights from the creative mind, and the acceptance of the submissive, receptive female role Solomon describes.

Be Like Alice in Wonderland
The message of humility was repeated in Matchett’s book "Journeys of Nothing in the Land of Everything", where he stresses that to achieve excellence, we must become a "Nothing" -- which was, he claimed, the working method of genius, and also the hidden creative message of "Alice in Wonderland".

The importance of such unpretentiousness was also expressed by Brenda Ueland in her book “If You Want to Write”, saying: "Well, why was it so dull then? so utterly disgustingly bad? . . . Certainly one reason was that I had not that friendly, generous humbleness to want to interest, entertain or make clear to others what I thought. It just became a literary stunt — though this kind of literature is often admired by people of the very highest brow". Although such humility may not always be expressed towards his fellow man, it must, apparently, be expressed towards the creative mind.