St. John’s work begins as a mystical poem that treats of sensual purgation and gives an account of the soul’s ascetical search for, and movement toward, perfect union; here the poet chronicles the ineffable mystical experiences along the way toward encounter with the Divine experienced in contemplation, and described as withdrawal from the world and, ultimately, ecstatic union:
In a dark night,
My longing heart, aglow with love,
– Oh, blessed lot! –
I went forth unseen
From my house that was at last in deepest rest.
Secure and protected by darkness,
I climbed the secret ladder, in disguise,
– Oh, blessed lot! –
In darkness, veiled and concealed I went
Leaving behind my house in deepest rest.
Oh, blissful night!
Oh, secret night, when I remained unseeing and unseen,
When the flame burning in my heart
Was my only light and guide.
This inward light,
A safer guide than nooonday’s brightness,
Showed me the place where He awaited me
– My soul’s Beloved –
A place of solitude.
Oh, night that guided me!
Oh, night more lovely than the rosy dawn!
Oh, night whose darkness guided me
To that sweet union,
In which the lover and Beloved are made one.
Upon the flower of my breast,
Kept undefiled for Him alone,
He fell asleep,
While I was waking
Caressing Him with gentle cedars’ breeze.
And when Aurora’s breath
Began to spread His curled hair,
His gentle hand
He placed upon my neck.
And all my senses were in bliss suspended.
Forgetful of myself,
My head reclined on my Beloved,
The world was gone
And all my cares at rest,
Forgotten all my grief among the lilies.45
It is significant to the present study that St. John sought to express mystical experience by means of poetry, suggestive of the prosaic indescribability of the experience. Unlike prose, poetic language is not limited by a sense of mimetic adequacy to external “reality;” rather, it dispenses with precise description and employs allusion and suggestion. Whereas prose legislates syntactical order and hierarchizes its linguistic components to effect precision and clarity, poetry gears discourse not toward logical sequence and narrative order but rather toward disjunction and connotative obscurity, its subject less immediately and concretely available to perception and only more gradually and evocatively suggested through its presentation in the description. The argument here is that poetic language may reveal the nature of things with an intensity and comprehensiveness lacking in ordinary language, a content not immediately available to linguistic/auditory perception.
The business of poetry, in other words, is to take one beyond the mere description and presentation of objects in the world; it has the distinctive feature of being absolutely self-conscious about language as its medium, employing that language in such a way that turns the hearer’s attention back onto it, not merely describing but evaluating the subject it addresses by forcing the hearer to engage with that subject through heightened concentration on the self-imposing language in description, and even to enjoy its artistry. It is a thickening of the verbal medium which involves the manipulation of words, phrases, and syntax wherein enumeration, sequence, and the uniform patterns of description—the “rational” form of language—are eliminated in favor of unfamiliar inversions of words, neologisms, broken phrases, ellipses, and deviations from and disruptions of the connectiveness of syntax. It is a matter of refusing traditional usage, forcing obscurity and disrupting immediate access to the subject—slowing access to that subject—yet generating fresh senses beyond the range of ordinary uses of language and thereby forcing our uncommon attentiveness to the language in description, and an uncommon sensitivity to the subject because of the very disruption of our habitual attention to it, because of the language in which it is formulated. As contemporary literary theorist David Scott has put it, “a radical change in the structure or ordering of syntax implies a corresponding shift in perspective in viewing the world. This is because the relationship between the order of syntax in language and the order of perception of phenomena in reality, as expressed in description, are closely bound up.”46 And as such it is, at least as deployed by John of the Cross, apophatic. St. John explains his approach to language in the Prologue to The Spiritual Canticle:
. . . the Holy Spirit, unable to express the fullness of His meaning in ordinary words, utters mysteries in strange figures and likenesses . . . [T]he abundant meanings of the Holy Spirit cannot be caught in words . . . Since these stanzas, then, were composed in a love flowing from abundant mystical understanding, I cannot explain them adequately, nor is it my intention to do so . . . This communication is secret and dark to the work of the intellect . . . Since this interior wisdom is so simple, general, and spiritual that in entering the intellect it is not clothed in any sensory species or image, the imaginative faculty cannot form an idea or picture of it in order to speak of it . . . The language of God has this trait: Since it is very spiritual and intimate to the soul, transcending everything sensory, it immediately silences the entire ability and harmonious composite of the exterior and interior senses . . . Since the wisdom of this contemplation is the language of God to the soul, the Pure Spirit to the spirit alone, all that is less than spirit such as the sensory, fails to perceive it. Consequently this wisdom is secret to the senses; they have neither the knowledge nor ability to speak of it, nor do they even desire to do so because it is beyond words.47
Similar in tone and structure to The Ascent of Mount Carmel is St. John’s The Living Flame of Love, an ecstatic expression of what is ultimately indefinable—the pursuit of a transcendent, unitive and noetic experience with absolute reality:
I entered into unknowing,
and there I remained unknowing
transcending all knowledge.
I entered into unknowing,
yet when I saw myself there,
without knowing where I was,
I understood great things;
I will not say what I felt
for I remained in unknowing
transcending all knowledge.
. . .
I was so ‘whelmed,
so absorbed and withdrawn,