ST. FRANCIS THE POET

NO one can read St. Francis’s one poem, the Canticle of the Sun, without feeling that had poetry claimed and won him in time, his might have been one of the greatest and sweetest of Italian voices. The story of its composition has a touching beauty. Towards the end of his life, when in the deepest dejection over the failure of his Order to live the life of joyful humility, unworldliness, and poverty to which he had pledged it, he came, blind and ill, to S. Clare’s Convent at St. Damien, on his way to Rieti, where his malady was to be treated. In this darkest hour of his life the untroubled faith and loving sympathy of his old friend brought consolation and peace to his torn spirit. She made him, it is said, a cell of reeds in the convent garden, where he could be free to come and go as he wished. “Little by little,” writes Paul Sabatier in his Vie de S. FranÇois, “the man of ancient days revived in him, and at times the Sisters heard the echo of strange chants, which mingled with the murmuring of the pines and olives, and which seemed to come from the cell of reeds.” One day, after a long conversation with Clare, he had sat down at the monastery table for refection. Scarcely had he begun to eat when he fell into a kind of trance. “Praise be to God!” he cried, on coming to himself. He had completed the Canticle of the Sun.

It is said that for a week afterwards he forgot his breviary, and passed his days in repeating to himself the strophes of his wonderful poem—a work in which, for all its religious ardour, the note of asceticism is little apparent; unless one sees it in his usual quaint adoption of the things of creation into a religious community! I append a literal translation, omitting two later verses composed for special occasions and not belonging to the first pure inspiration. It is written in unrhymed irregular stanzas:—

CANTICLE OF THE SUN