How Well I Know That Fountain (Song of the Soul that Rejoices in Knowing God by Faith)
"Que bien sé yo la fonte que mana y corre, aunque es de noche" — "How well I know the fount that flows and runs, although it is night" — is a short Spanish poem by John of the Cross, composed during the nine months he spent imprisoned in a cell in the Carmelite priory at Toledo, where he was held by friars of his own order who opposed the Discalced reform. He had no writing materials for much of that confinement and carried the verses in memory. The poem takes its refrain from the secular song tradition of the period and turns it to divine use, a practice common in sixteenth-century Spain: a familiar cadence about night becomes the burden of a song about faith. John gave it the heading "Song of the soul that rejoices in knowing God by faith."
The poem's whole argument lives in the tension between its two repeated phrases. Each stanza opens with a claim to knowledge — I know well, I know that, I know there is no — and each closes by conceding that it is night. What the speaker knows is a fountain: hidden, unoriginated, the source of every other origin, so deep that no one can ford it, so clear that its brightness is never darkened, so abundant that its waters reach heaven, earth, and hell. Then the fountain proves to be threefold. From it a current is born, equal in might; from the two together proceeds a third that neither precedes. The Trinity is stated not as doctrine but as hydrology. In the final stanzas the eternal fount is found hidden in the living bread, calling creatures to drink, and the speaker declares that he sees the water he thirsts for in that bread — still, and finally, in the dark. Faith here is not a substitute for sight but a mode of genuine knowing whose certainty and whose blindness are inseparable. John wrote prose commentaries on several of his other poems; he left none on this one.
The poem has endured as the most concentrated statement of John's account of faith, the same night that his longer treatises analyze at length, compressed into a form a person can memorize and carry. It is also among the few places where his Trinitarian and Eucharistic devotion surfaces directly in verse.
Who should read this: anyone drawn to John's teaching on the dark night who wants it in its most compact and least frightening form, and anyone who prays the Eucharist and wants language for believing what cannot be seen. It will disappoint readers looking for the bridal drama of the Spiritual Canticle or for argument they can follow step by step; this is a poem to be repeated, not analyzed.