Spiritual Canticle

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The Spiritual Canticle (Spanish: Cántico Espiritual) is one of the poetic works of the Spanish mystical poet Saint John of the Cross.

Saint John of the Cross, a Carmelite friar and priest during the Counter-Reformation, was arrested and jailed by the Calced Carmelites in 1577 at the Carmelite Monastery of Toledo because of his close association with Saint Teresa of Ávila in the Discalced Carmelite reforms. He remained imprisoned for nine months in a cell, in bad conditions that caused him much suffering. He memorized, in the absence of the means to write them down, a thirty-one-stanza version of the Canticle. Some years later, after 1582, he wrote down the last stanzas in Baeza and Granada, the last five ones after a conversation with a nun, sister Francisca de la Madre de Dios.

Ana de Jesús asked him to write a comment to his poem, which he did in 1584.^[1] It was just Ana de Jesús who after being expelled from Spain took the poem with her, and finally it was published in Paris 1622, but in a French translation from Spanish (having not been published in the first Spanish collection of John's works of 1618). In 1627, it was published in the original Spanish in Brussels, and in the same year was published in Italian, at Rome. In Spain, the poem was first published in the Madrid edition of John's works of 1630.