After a Loving Encounter (Stanzas Concerning a Spiritual Chase)

"Tras de un amoroso lance" is a short lyric by John of the Cross, known, like most of his poems, by its opening line: "After an amorous quest, and not lacking in hope, I flew so high, so high, that I overtook the prey." It belongs to the sixteenth-century Spanish practice of writing a lo divino — taking a secular song, in this case a courtly hunting or falconry lyric, and turning its language of pursuit, flight, and capture toward God. John wrote in the Castilian of the ballads and love songs his Carmelite communities already knew, and he left no prose commentary on this poem, unlike the Spiritual Canticle, the Dark Night, or the Living Flame. It circulated in manuscript among the friars and nuns who copied his verse before any of it reached print.

What the poem does is compress the whole logic of John's teaching into a set of hunting paradoxes turning on a single refrain. The soul flies after its quarry and must fly so high that it loses sight of itself. The flight then fails — the hunter falls short — and yet the prey is taken, because love flew higher than the flight did. Ascent inverts: the higher the soul climbs, the lower, more spent, and more abased it finds itself, until abasing itself so far becomes the very act of rising so high. The closing stanza names the hidden engine of all of it: heavenly hope attains as much as it hopes. This is the theological virtue John assigns to the purification of memory, given here not as doctrine but as the exhilaration of a hunt in which the hunter is caught by what he chases.

The poem has lasted because it says in twenty-odd lines what the treatises take hundreds of pages to argue, and says it with a lightness the treatises never permit themselves. It is also the clearest place in John's corpus where hope, rather than the more famous night, carries the weight — a corrective for readers who know him only as the poet of deprivation. Read alongside the commentaries, it shows that his austerity was always in service of pursuit.

Who should read this: anyone drawn to John of the Cross who wants him at his most concentrated, and readers of poetry who want to see how a devotional tradition repurposed secular song. It is not an introduction to his thought, and it will frustrate anyone looking for instruction or steps; for that, go to the Ascent. Those impatient with paradox should skip it, since paradox is the entire method here.