is not, however, that Vaughan was incapable of creating highly concrete images; rather, the nature of the experience which is his concern, requires precisely a formality of image, in other words, a symbol, like the formalised, religious images in stained glass: images that lie somewhere between the visual and the conceptual. To function aesthetically as intended, poems that employ this kind of imagery or symbolism demand that the reader allow the conceptual or symbolic meaning to predominate over its visual realisation. To put this more succinctly: when in the prayer 'Hail, Mary' we encounter the metaphorical phrase 'Blessed is the fruit of thy womb', there can be no question of activating any visual imagery of 'fruit' and even less so of 'womb': the concept, reinforced by a lengthy tradition of usage, strictly contains the visual possibilities of the symbol.

To turn to my translation of 'Noche oscura', I may state frankly here that I worked on the assumption that the poem's symbol of the nocturnal tryst should never remotely suggest sexual intercourse. I have understood the symbol in its traditional religious sense, having its primary source in the Canticle. Josef Pieper in his Ueber die Liebe quotes several thinkers who have been of the view that love, properly speaking, should only be applied to the longing, not to its fulfilment, and that in its fulfilment it undergoes such a radical transformation that the word becomes inapplicable. Whatever one may think about general truth of this, which is not directly attributable to Pieper, it is a concept of love that seems to me to be of some help in coming to terms with the romantic connotations of Juan de la Cruz's language.

For the mystic, the crucial difficulty is how to express experience that seems immediately betrayed by any attempt to express it. Although of a different order, intuitive experience poses a similar problem: the mind, functioning intuitively, moves so fast that it arrives at its insight without conscious memory of its journey there, thus creating the problem of how to explain and justify the insight to others. The mystic attempts to express the normally inexpressible, and is as convinced of its reality as of anything in the world of commonsense.

The experience of 'Noche oscura' has been subjected to many different kinds of interpretation, from the psychological to the sociological, depending on the interpreter's ideology. Apart from those who share the poet's religious faith, the non-religious have read the poem and acclaimed it a poetic masterpiece. For my part, I have responded, as a translator, to the poem's romantic imagery essentially within the poem's religious context. I have kept in mind the Canticle. The latitude I have permitted myself extends to the literary conventions of amour courtois, which eschew sensual grossness. The nocturnal tryst of 'Noche oscura' is that of the soul with God, and, in a broader sense, the poem expresses a human yearning for union with what is entirely of its own nature.