“Then Jesus said unto them. Yet a little while is the light with you. Walk while ye have the light, lest darkness come upon you: for he that walketh in darkness knoweth not whither he goeth.”

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In the Middle Ages the longing for rest and escape from danger, which found its expression in cloisters, is expressed in poetry by descriptions of flowery, secluded meadows, suggesting the classic meadows of asphodel. Dante has given one already in the Inferno, and gives another here.

Compare with these the following from The Miracles of Our Lady , by Gonzalo de Bercéo, a monk of Calahorra, who lived in the thirteenth century, and is the oldest of the Castilian poets whose name has come down to us:⁠—