22 pages • 44 minutes read
John of the CrossDark Night of the Soul
Fiction | Poem | Adult | Published in 1583A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Symbols & Motifs
The Dark Night
The poem uses the night to symbolize life’s strife, the dark moments when faith is most sorely tested because God, with His promise of deliverance and love, seems most distant. The night into which the speaker steals symbolizes his willingness to engage in those tribulations, to embrace that suffering. The night remains an allegorical thing—the speaker does not qualify his predicament by contextualizing his “night.” St. John of the Cross does not share the particulars of his arrest, the agonies of his imprisonment, and the humiliation at the hands of those he knows are far less spiritual, far less worthy of God’s love. Thus, night can symbolize the emotional pain of any Christian enduring unexpected and unearned pain—the reality of illness or the approach of death, betrayal and the loss of love, economic deprivation, or any crisis of faith and doubt.
Though the poem indicates that the speaker has done nothing to justify the pain he endures, that he is a victim of persecution without cause, the enveloping dark night symbolizes how completely the speaker feels. His afflictions surround him like a starless night. But the poem, as an expression of mystical thought, alters the perception of the night in Stanza III when the forbidding dark is suddenly described as “happy” (Line 11), the term meaning not that the night itself is happy but rather that it is fortuitous that the speaker is experiencing it, because suffering alone will lead the speaker to the truest union with God. That is why, by Stanza V, the night is described as “guiding” (Line 21), the speaker seeing, at last, the reality of suffering as the surest guide to God’s love.
God’s Gentle, Powerful Hand
The greatest challenge for a mystic is to concretize the power and glory of God. That essence is so real and immediate to the mystic that when it comes time to share that certainty with those less gifted with visionary confidence, words stumble into cliché.
For John, the vision of his soul’s union with the God for which he has so deeply yearned falters at that very moment of consummation. How does he put into words the feeling of union with God and how that moment is both ethereal and yet somehow physical? For John the visionary mystic, union with God means ravishment, the total destruction of the soul, and in return, the restoration of the soul into something stronger and grander, refined by its fusion with God.
John selects the hand as his symbol of God’s terrifying grace, although John understands that, in doing so, he is anthropomorphizing God, degrading God by defining him using human parts. But the hand is richly symbolic. God does not regard the speaker. God does not speak to the speaker. Unlike the eyes or the voice, the hands are instruments for reaching out and touching, ways of securing connection that are as much physical as emotional. The poet recognizes the paradox: “He struck me on the neck / With His gentle hand, / And all sensation left me” (Lines 33-35).
How can a gentle hand wreak such damage to leave the speaker senseless, rendering him unable to feel, shorting out his entire physical system? That gentle, savage power symbolizes John’s perception of the loving power of God.
The Lilies
In the end, the speaker feels wonderfully lost in a generous oblivion that suggests the ultimate calm of bonding with God. To suggest this state of completeness and spiritual fulfillment, the poet describes himself as “forgotten” (Line 39) by the clamoring troubles of the world and now afloat in lilies, all his cares thrown away.
Lilies have a rich scriptural history, one familiar to a student of theology such as John. Within the parables of Christ (Luke 12), Christ uses the tender vulnerability of the lilies to suggest how much God loves such vulnerability and protects such helplessness within a giving and generous love. Witnesses to the Crucifixion gave the apostles accounts of how lilies bloomed at the foot of the Cross wherever the tears of Jesus fell, associating the flowers with the triumph of the Cross and the promise of eternal life. That association, in turn, led to the lily’s symbolic position as the Easter flower, a symbol of the Christian triumph over death and the promise of God’s love once the sorry and sad pilgrimage of this life is over.
It is not that the speaker wishes himself dead nor even contemplates suicide as a way to cope with life’s troubles. Rather, in feeling the fusion with God’s love, the speaker finds his way to the sublime contentment of the lily, the reassurance of God’s power that will, in the end, conquer those troubles. The speaker offers a radiant closing vision of his soul, now animated by God’s powerful love, forsaking entirely the petty discomforts, anxieties, and troubles of the body—“Lost to all things and myself” (Line 38)—to embrace the supreme peace in God that surpasses all understanding.
