AGOSTINO della CROCE (da CRUZ). — Portuguese religious, in the world A. Pimenta, brother of the celebrated poet Diego Bernardes. Born at Ponte da Barca (Minho) in 1540 or 1542, he entered the convent of Serra de Cintra in 1561. He spent the final period of his life in a dwelling that he had built for himself in the Serra da Arrábida, where he lived in recollection and isolation as a hermit. He died at Setubal in 1619, having become the object of demonstrations of great veneration.
In his youth A. composed love poems, which he himself later consigned to the flames. Some of them, however, were spared, and are sufficient to give us an idea of his passionate and sensitive soul, expressed in sonnets mostly of Petrarchan and Camonian style. He subsequently transmitted this passion and sensitivity, transformed and purified, to his religious lyric poetry.
The poetic production of A. da Cruz consists essentially of 141 sonnets, 15 eclogues, 19 elegies, several epigrams and several odes, to which must also be added an epitaph and three letters. The sonnets on religious subjects preferably take the form of a prayer or panegyric. Among them one may admire, for example, fine paraphrases of the Pater, the Ave, the Credo, morning or evening prayers, and the like; the others sing of God, the Crucified One, the Virgin, the saints (e.g. Saint Clare, Saint John the Baptist), or solemn liturgical anniversaries. In a large part of these compositions there is a fervent and deeply moving asceticism, which nevertheless expresses itself in smooth and harmonious verse, without the apology becoming rhetorical or the style stiffening into the conceptual formulas with which dogmatic subject matter so often must be clothed.
Ruggero M. Ruggieri