Read Yedid Nefesh on Sefaria for the surrounding biblical/liturgical context.
Born in Safed (Tzfat), Galilee, into a Sephardic family that had fled the Spanish Expulsion. Azikri was part of the same circle of kabbalists as Rabbi Isaac Luria (the Arizal), Rabbi Moshe Cordovero, and Rabbi Shlomo Alkabetz (who wrote Lecha Dodi). His major work was Sefer Charedim, a guide to fear-of-God and the commandments, but he is remembered today primarily for this single poem, which the kabbalists started singing at sunset on Fridays and which spread to every Jewish community within a century.
Manuscript evidence: a handwritten manuscript of Yedid Nefesh in Azikri's own hand was found in the early 20th century, with a personal note that he composed it as a meditation tool for the moments before Shabbat began.
The four stanzas of Yedid Nefesh secretly correspond to the four letters of the Tetragrammaton (the four-letter name of God: yud-heh-vav-heh). The first letter of each stanza, when read in sequence, spells the divine name:
This acrostic is invisible to the casual reader but obvious to anyone who knows what to look for. The kabbalists loved this kind of secret structure: the surface is a love poem; the hidden structure is the divine name itself, woven through the lines. Singing the poem is, technically, an utterance of the Name.
The poem operates entirely in the register of romantic/erotic love: yedid (beloved), ratzon (desire), ayal (the hart of Song of Songs), nofet tzuf (sweet as honeycomb), yedidutecha (Your friendship/affection). This is not metaphor lightly chosen, for the kabbalists, the human soul's love for God is structured exactly like erotic longing: an inadequate, desperate, unequal love seeking union with the infinite.
The Song of Songs is the textual ancestor of this kind of poetry. Rabbi Akiva said the Song of Songs is the holiest book of the Tanakh because it dramatizes the love between Israel and God. Yedid Nefesh extends that tradition into the personal: not the love of the people for God, but the love of each individual soul.