Anonymous Sonnet
(Sixteenth or Seventeenth Century)

A Cristo crucificado (To Christ Crucified)

     This famous sonnet, in spite of the ascription of its authorship to Saint Teresa of Avila in the Biblioteca de autores españoles, is still declared to be anonymous. (M. R. Fouché-Delbosc, Revue Hispanique, 1895, vol. ii.) It has also been attributed, without sufficient reason, to Saint Ignatius de Loyola, Saint Francis Xavier, and Pedro de los Reyes. The Latin hymn “Deus ego te amo” is similar to it in many ways. The latter hymn, the work of Saint Francis Xavier, has been beautifully rendered into English by Alexander Pope. The sonnet has also been translated by Dryden in his “O God, thou art the object of my love.”