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Despite the declaration in Fray Luis de León's "Virgen, que el sol mas pura" that he has been a devotee of Mary since his earliest years, one might well question the consensus among critics that this poem should be read simply as a sincere expression of Marian piety.1 Even though this is the only Marian poem we can confidently attribute to Fray Luis, and although in his prose works there is no equivalent celebration of Mary's semi-divine status, most critics have routinely asserted that there is no reason to doubt the poetic voice in this song when he says that he has always hoped to deserve the Virgin's protection "dende mi tierna edad."2 This agreement among critics can be attributed in broad terms to the fact that most modern readings of this poem have understood it to be a rather straightforward and simple piece, reflecting the poet's feelings during his imprisonment by the Inquisition between 1571 and 1576.3 Like the other "prison poems" assumed to have been written during or shortly after Fray Luis's incarceration, this song to the Virgin has been judged to express a passion so often deemed lacking in his more serene metaphysical or ethical writings.
For many modern critics, in fact, these supposedly biographical poems written in or about prison have been one of Fray Luis's saving graces, because in them he seems to move towards a more Romantic subject position, showing us a poet who is writing from the heart rather than from the head or from tradition. Together with other tidbits gathered from Fray Luis's texts, from his inquisitorial trial or from legends about his life, the Marian piety expressed in this poem has thus been judged sincere and autobiographical by critics ranging from Aubrey Bell and Oreste Macri to Rosanna Soriani and Juan Francisco Alcina. Many of these 2Oth-century critics, even when they acknowledge the poem's obvious debt to Petrarch's final cancion, "Vergine bella, che di sol vestita," take Fray Luis's apostrophe to the Virgin as the authentic voice of an imprisoned poet, finally stripped of his artificial and overly intellectualized metaphysics.4 It is almost as if such readers accept the Inquisitorial assumption that the soul bears itself most fully under the duress of incarceration and the threat...