For All the Beauty (A Gloss with a Spiritual Meaning)
"Por toda la hermosura" is one of the shorter poems of John of the Cross, the Castilian Carmelite friar (1542–1591) who worked alongside Teresa of Ávila to reform the order and paid for it with imprisonment by his own brethren in Toledo. It belongs to a Golden Age genre John used repeatedly: the glosa a lo divino, in which a poet takes a refrain from secular love poetry and reworks it so that its longing points to God rather than to a human beloved. Here the borrowed refrain — the soul will never lose itself for any beauty, only for "un no sé qué que se alcanza por ventura," an I-know-not-what that is come upon by chance — becomes the hinge of a sustained argument about desire. Unlike the Spiritual Canticle, the Dark Night, and the Living Flame of Love, this poem carries no prose commentary from John's hand; it stands alone.
The poem works by refusal, stanza after stanza. Each takes up a genuine created good — beauty, sweetness, taste, the satisfactions the appetite reaches for — concedes its attractiveness, and then declines to be lost for it. The reasoning is not moralistic but experiential: a finite good, at the limit of what it can do, exhausts the appetite and spoils the palate. Every stanza returns to the refrain, so that the poem enacts what it describes, the will repeatedly declining to stop where it could stop. John's strongest move is the claim that the generous heart never rests where passage is possible but presses toward what is harder, and that this restlessness raises faith until it acquires a taste for the unnameable. The "no sé qué" is apophatic in the strict sense — not a coy vagueness but a refusal to give the highest good a name that would reduce it to something the mind could hold. And it is reached por ventura, by good fortune: gratuitous, not earned by technique.
The poem has lasted because it compresses the whole of John's teaching on detachment into a few stanzas that a reader can carry in memory. It also corrects the common misreading of that teaching as contempt for the world: what the poem practices is not hatred of beauty but discrimination among goods, and its energy is entirely one of appetite rather than renunciation for its own sake.
Who should read this: anyone who finds the Ascent of Mount Carmel forbidding and wants John's doctrine of desire in miniature, and readers of Spanish poetry who want to see how the a lo divino tradition actually functions. Not for readers who want steps, structure, or the author's own exegesis — John supplies none here — or for anyone looking for a poem that will reassure them about their attachments.