Jenning Jennings The Essence Of The Saint's Spirit

The essence of the saint’s spirit is captured in the prose poem as the rhythms flow in flawless measures. Words are like strokes of a paint brush and the understatements accompanying the single word sentences create the atmosphere of dust and heat. “Spain, The wild dust, the whipped corn,/earth easy for footsteps, shallow starving seeds. High sky at night like walls./ Silence surrounding Avila.”(86) The four waters are described in the same fragmentary style, so that the flow of water itself becomes the only continuous image. Flowing through the well, the waterwheel, the pool and lastly the place of peace, the water reaches the spirit. “Then the entire cleansing, utterly from nowhere…Her mind met it, her will approved it. And all beyonds’ backwaters, dry words of old prayers were lost in it.”(86)

Jennings sees in Teresa “ A warmth, magnanimity and joy,” which she feels ennobled her, besides making her “more human, more compassionate.” Above all, she admires the devotional fervor of Teresa in conveying the mystical experiences in the simplest narrative forms. The transformation that Teresa went through from her worldly experiences to mysticism was instinctively felt and understood by Jennings. But to work out these instincts into expressions needed imagination. It is this faculty that Jennings recognized in Teresa as the most distinguishing attribute.
In several poems from Song for a Birth Or a Death (1961), Jennings looks back over the history of human experience and consider the nature and consequences of traditional ways of explaining experience. She tries to get back to the source and origin of human knowledge and to imagine alternative ways of making sense of the