One of the first things we notice about John of the Cross’s Canticle (1577), a dialogue between Bridegroom and Bride, based on the Songs of Songs and mainly written in prison, is that she does most of the talking. She also makes most of the running. The Canticle opens with her anxious: ‘Where have hidden yourself and left me to groan?’ She sounds like a woman in love complaining: ‘Why hasn’t he phoned?’ She then sets out to pursue him, full of determination.
And she gets him.
The Old Testament Song of Songs is described by its Jerusalem Bible introduction as originally a series of secular love songs with an allegorical interpretation being applied later. In it the Bridegroom has lengthy passionate passages as well as the Bride (for example, it is he who is speaking for nearly the whole of chapter 4). In John of the Cross’s Canticle, intended as a dialogue between the ‘soul’ and her divine lover, she is the protagonist throughout, he speaks much less and is a more remote, less realised character. In sumptuous poetry it is the Bride’s (the poet’s) feelings that are the main focus. And even though notoriously more difficult to write well about, her feelings of happiness and fulfilment at the end of the poem are expressed as poignantly as her previous feelings of longing and lack (see the extract on page 17).
It is extraordinary how this celibate male mystical poet identifies so vividly with a woman in love. In Tudor England the sonnets of Shakespeare, his contemporary, all have a male protagonist and so do most love sonnets of the period. I think Don Cupitt is right in his Mysticism after Modernity (Blackwells 1998) to say that mystical poetry is subversive. The subject of John’s poem is human – the Bride, the ‘soul’ – and in comparison, the divine object of her love is shadowy indeed.
I first read the Canticle during what would now be called my gap year in Spain more than forty years ago. As a fervent adolescent, I was enthralled by lines such as ‘a don’t-know-what that they keep stammering’, especially in the original Spanish: ‘un no sé qué que quedan balbuciendo’. Today I have long since stopped believing that God exists. When I walk through the park where giant poplars are rustling, I mutter ‘un no sé qué que quedan balbuciendo’ and find I am still delighted. As with the Hopkins quoted in the Editorial, the delight remains even if the poem’s divine figure is imaginary.