ANONYMOUS.
PHOENIX INTER FLAMMAS EXPIRANS.
The suggestion of this beautiful poem is from Canticles. The date of composition is the seventeenth century.
The subject is the soul's 'desire to depart and to be with Christ.' The second to the fifth stanzas take their form from the legend of the phoenix, a fabulous bird which was said to build its funeral pyre, to burn itself, singing a death-song, and to rise from its ashes in renewed youth. The soul, passing from this life to immortality, conceives itself as a phoenix consuming in the flames and singing a death-song (the third, fourth, and fifth stanzas).
3. aegram: Canticles 2. 5. 4. Dilecto: Christ in heaven. Cf. Canticles 2. 3. 27-30. The flame leaping toward the sky is a type of the soul in its eagerness to ascend to heaven. Cf.:
Rivers to the ocean run
Nor stay in all their course:
Fire ascending seeks the sun:
Both speed them to their source.
So the soul that's born of God
Pants to view his glorious face,
Upward tends to his abode
To rest in his embrace.
—Seagrave.