(Juan de Yepes
Alvarez, Fontiveros, Spain, 1542 – Ebeda, id, 1591) Spanish poet and religious.
Born in am impoverished Hindu family, he began working very young in a hospital
and received his intellectual training at the Jesuit school of Mediana del
Campo.
In 1564 he
began studying arts and philosophy at the University of Salamanca, where he
met, in 1567, Saint Teresa of Jesus, with whom he agreed to found two new orders
of Carmelites. His reformed barefoot Carmelite order stumbled upon the open
hostility of the Carmelite shoes, despite which he managed to hold several positions.
After teaching at a novice school in Mancera, he founded the school of Alcala
de Henares. Later he became the confessor of the monastery of St. Teresa.
In 1577
the intrigues of the Carmelites shoes and he was imprisoned in a convent in
Toledo for eight months. Alfer escaping, he sought refuge in Almodovar. He spent
the rest of his life in Andalusia, where he became a provincial vicar. In 1591he
fell again into disgrace and was deposed from all his religious positions, so
he planned to emigrate to America, a project that frustrated his premature
death. Canonized in 1726, he was proclaimed a Doctor of the Church in 1926.
The Poetry of
Sain John of the Cross
Although the
verses that are preserved from him are scarce and were not publish until after
his death, he is considered one of the greatest Spanish poets of the time and
as the greatest exponent of mystical poetry. During the months of his
confinement in 1577, which he spent in complete isolation and subjected to cruel
interrogations, he prepared his so-called major poems: Call of living love,
Spiritual Song and Dark Night.
For fear
of being taken by “illuminists”, none of these works were published before
1618, when, with the exception of a spiritual canoer who was nine years later
in Brussels, they were published under the title of Spiritual Works that lead
to a soul to perfect union with God. In 1962 the work was published in Rome in
prose Notices for After professed, written shortly before he died.
In his three
major poems, closely related to each other, John condemned his own personal
experiences, derived from the constat yearning that his sould would reach the
ideal fusion with his Creator; the three compositions, in one way or another,
describe the mystical ascent of the soul to God, and since they arose as a transits
from a mystical experience that was expressed in allegories and symbols, Saint
John of the Cross considered that they should be explained. This led to the
writing of prose comments to the poems.
In Call of
Living love, Saint John of the Cross recreates the emotion of loving ecstasy,
while in Dark Night, which consists of eight lire, he uses the image of a girl
who escapes at night to go o an appointment with his lover as a representation
of the flight from the soul of the prison of the senses, in search of communion
with God.
Spiritual song
is the most complex and extensive work of his production. In it, to detail the
different paths that the soul runs until it is possible to merge with divinity,
it develops a recreation, as an eclogue, of the biblical Song of Songs. Through
forty lire he describes the hunt for the Bridegroom (God) by his wife (the
soul), who asks about him to the creatures of nature. After finding it, there
is a loving dialog that culminates in the union of the two lovers.
Unlike
Saint Teresa of Jesus, who adopts the colloquial tone and nourishes the effects
of light to express the experience of communion with God, the poetry of Saint
John of the Cross is constituted in a living language that, drinking in various
sources, seeks the expression of arrow and the ecstasy of the mystical union;
its purpose is to translate, or the less to let us see, that invisible and
ineffable reality that is divine love, appealing to symbolism and the rich
expressive and fascinate even non-believers, because their verses, by operating
mainly as expressive ways of an intimate personal experience, do not compromise
beliefs, traditions or cultures not shared by the subject.
As fruit
of this mystical outburst, far from any logical discourse, predominate in the
major poems of Saint John of the Cross the irrational, subconscious and
intuitive elements that translate stylistically into a tendency to synthesis
and a great expressive density predominate in the major poems of him. To communicate
the experience sensations, dispense with any superfluous element and uses the
noun abundantly, to the detriment of verbs and adjectives. In order to make known
the joys that the mystical link produces, it uses with profusion the affective
twists, repetitions, antithesis, chaotic enumerations, the sudden passage from
one subject to another or allegorical references, based, for the most past, on
the subject of profane love. It also does not exclude the popular and rustic
lexicon, dialects and diminutives, which are presented alongside educated
voices and words of symbolic content.
In this
way, combining the ancient symbolism of the Song of Song with the formular
typical of petrarquism, Saint John of the Cross produces a rich mystical
literature that sinks its roots in themes theology and the medieval German and
Flemish mystics. Its production reflects a wide religious formation, although
it leaves the influence of 16th-century song, especially on the use
of profane love to symbolize and represent the mystical feeling of divine love.
The stanza most used in his poems is the lira, although he shows equal looseness
in the use of octosylling romance.
To this
also contributes its tendency to abandon the discursive register and eliminate
neutral links without aesthetic value to seek a constant juxtaposition of
poetic elements of great plasticity. All this, together with the intellectual
rigor that the author himself highlighted in this comments, gives the poetry a
singular balance between his sensual images and the acetic and sublime impulse
that inspired it, and makes it one of the summits of Renaissance lyrical in
Spanish language.
