Without Support and With Support (Other Stanzas with a Divine Meaning)

A short lyric poem in Spanish by John of the Cross (1542–1591), the Carmelite friar who worked with Teresa of Ávila on the reform of the order, was imprisoned by his own brethren in Toledo, and left behind a small body of verse that has come to be regarded as among the finest in the Spanish language. The poem is a glosa: a form in which a three-line refrain is stated at the outset and then unfolded in stanzas, each closing on one of its lines. Like much of John's poetry it belongs to the tradition of writing "a lo divino" — taking the conventions of secular love song and turning them toward God. Unlike the Spiritual Canticle, the Dark Night, and the Living Flame of Love, John left no prose commentary on this poem. It stands alone, without an author's explanation.

The refrain announces three paradoxes at once: without support and with support, without light and living in darkness, wholly being consumed. The first stanza explains the first: the soul has let go of every created thing and is raised above itself, leaning on God alone — so it can truthfully say it has no prop and yet is propped. The second takes up the darkness. The poet grants that he suffers shadows in this mortal life, but denies that this is a great evil, because love gives life precisely as it grows blind; lacking light, the soul has a heavenly life instead. The third stanza turns to the burning. Love makes good and evil in the poet taste alike, transforms the soul into itself, and in its savory flame consumes him quickly, leaving nothing. The movement is not from darkness to relief but from deprivation to identification: what looked like loss at the start is named, by the end, as union.

The poem has endured because it compresses into nine short lines what John elsewhere takes hundreds of pages to argue — that faith operates as night, that detachment is not deprivation but a different kind of holding, and that the soul's darkness may be the sign of its nearness rather than its distance. Spanish readers prize its plainness of diction; translators struggle chiefly with arrimo, a homely word for a prop or something to lean against, with no clean English equivalent.

Who should read this: anyone praying in dryness or darkness who needs to hear that condition described without alarm, and readers of John's prose who want the poem the doctrine was built to serve. Not for those wanting practical instruction or consolation in a warm key — the poem offers neither, and its comfort is entirely on the far side of loss.