Romance on the Psalm 'By the Waters of Babylon'

A short Spanish ballad paraphrasing Psalm 137 (Vulgate 136), the psalm of the exiles weeping by the rivers of Babylon. It belongs to the body of verse that emerged from the crisis of John of the Cross's captivity: seized by Carmelites opposed to the Discalced reform in December 1577, he was held for some nine months in a cell in the Carmelite priory at Toledo before escaping in August 1578. He had no library there and, for most of that time, no writing materials. What he composed, he composed in his head. The psalm of exile was already in his memory from the Divine Office, and it gave him a text that matched his situation exactly — a captive singer asked to sing, in a city that was not his own.

John writes it in the romance form: octosyllabic lines in loose assonance, the meter of popular Spanish balladry rather than the Italianate lira of the Spiritual Canticle. The plainness is doing work. The poem tracks the psalm's own movement — sitting down beside the water, weeping, hanging the instruments on the green willows, refusing to perform joy for captors — and then turns it inward. The exile's grief becomes the soul's grief at separation from the God it loves; the refusal to sing becomes a refusal to counterfeit consolation while consolation is absent. Where the psalm's speaker will not sing the Lord's song in a strange land, John's speaker discovers that love itself is consuming him, and that the only way home runs through the loss of everything he had held as his own. The closing stanzas take up the psalm's most difficult verse, the dashing of the little ones against the rock, and read the rock as Christ — the patristic reading, turned into an act of self-dispossession: it is his own attachments that are broken there. Unlike the Canticle, the Dark Night, and the Living Flame, John never wrote a prose commentary on this romance. It stands alone, unexplained.

It has lasted because it is the rare thing: a mystical poem written from inside deprivation rather than in recollection of it, and one that refuses the consoling move. It also shows how a sixteenth-century contemplative actually prayed the Psalter — memorized, personalized, read christologically without apology.

Who should read this: anyone praying through imprisonment, illness, or a season where God is absent and performing gladness would be a lie; readers of John's major poems who want to see where they came from. Not for those wanting his systematic doctrine, which lies in the treatises, and not for readers unwilling to work with allegorical reading of the psalm's violent final verse, which this poem confronts head-on rather than skipping.