The Innocent Audacity

Extract

If one did not know their context, it would be easy to mistake many of the mystical poems of St John of the Cross for the most passionate declarations of profane love. Influenced in content and imagery by the Song of Songs, and in form and rhythm both by sixteenth-century Spanish court poetry and by traditional folk verse, the poems assimilate several traditions, several attitudes. In one of St John’s songs between the soul and the Bridegroom, the Bride cries,

‘My Love’s the mountain range,

The valleys each with solitary grove,

The islands far and strange,

The streams with sounds that change,

The whistling of the lovesick winds that rove.

Deep-cellared in the cavern

Of my love’s heart, I drank of him alive:

Now, stumbling from the tavern,

No thoughts of mine survive,

And I have lost the flock I used to drive.’

If the reader did not know St John’s own commentaries on his Spiritual Canticle, it would not be difficult to assign such verse as this to the plane of physical love. The poem shocks because it is soTHE INNOCENT AUDACITY intimate. This is as true of the original Spanish as of the English translation; the problems involved in conveying, without loss, the extraordinary intensity of the original poems into another quite different language are well stated by the American poet John Frederick Nims, who has himself recently produced a very vivid rendering of St John’s poems: ‘My venture’, he says, ‘the windmill I am tilting at,