Introduction: St John the Poet
St John of the Cross’s allegorical poem and pastoral eclogue (dialogue), The Spiritual Canticle (which was first published in 1622), was born from hiddenness. The lyric verses, which relay a story using a regular rhythm, were first created in John’s mind when he was unjustly incarcerated in a Carmelite monastery in Toledo in Spain from December 1577 to August 1578.[1] It was only when a jailer secretly provided John with materials for writing that he could pen thirty-one stanzas (and most likely write the remaining eight stanzas at two separate times some years after he had escaped from imprisonment from 1582-1584).[2] These poetic words began in John’s heart; they were rationalised in his mind, and then they were physically formed on paper. This mimics the customary creative process, particularly present in the bardic tradition, where the poet speaks his lines before they are written down. So it is with John. His words begin in the oral or spoken tradition before they are consigned to a written format. The charism of hiddenness and privacy, which is a phrase that I have created myself, is central to John’s poetry. He formed the words in a hidden space and wrote them down due to the secret providence of writing supplies. He carries a significant capacity for hiddenness within himself, and hiddenness is a key theme and image in The Spiritual Canticle. I argue that it is this hiddenness, as with St Thérèse of Lisieux (1873-1897), that led to him becoming a canonised saint on 27 December 1726 and Doctor of the Church (Doctor Ecclesiae) on 24 August 1926. The year 2026 encapsulates John’s centenaries for both his canonisation and doctorate. Although these centenary celebrations are indeed public moments in the Catholic Church, which deserve celebration and commemoration, the hidden roots of John’s spirituality and personal relationship with God must also be remembered as the ingredients that make up his sainthood and doctoral title. It is private hiddenness that makes the public saint.
Form and Genre
It is clear that The Spiritual Canticle is firmly rooted in the biblical-poetic genre in the sense that it combines both theology and literature. This genre applies to both poetry that is enclosed within Scripture and poetry that is composed using Scripture and biblical imagery as the inspiration. In a sense, theology hides within poetry, and poetry hides within theology. Writers often use poetry as a creative outlet to express wandering thoughts in the mind and may decide upon using free verse, which does not have a fixed metre or rhythm, in order to capture an idea without any metrical obstacles. Poetry, however, can also have many rules that provide a structure for creativity. John chooses to adapt the Song of Songs by adopting the lira form (also known as lyre) that is composed of five-line stanzas that include three seven-syllabled lines (heptasyllables) and two eleven-syllabled lines (hendecasyllables).[3] In his chapter titled ‘Paradoxes of Desire in St John of the Cross and Solomon Ibn Gabirol,’ Luis Manuel Girón-Negrón writes that ‘[t]he Petrarchan lyre in his [John’s] hands becomes a poetic vehicle for quasi-musical experimentation.’[4] John strikes the balance between structure and creativity, and uses a popular and public form from fourteenth century Italy in order to relay what is privately going on in his own soul.
The Song of Solomon or The Song of Songs includes many metaphors, such as the dove and the garden, which John also adopts in his poetry. It is not unusual for writers to create their own work that is based on pre-existing writing. Although in a completely different context and subject, the Irish poet W. B. Yeats wrote an epic poem based on a story about a dialogue between St Patrick and a mythological hero named Oisin.[5] In this poem named The Wanderings of Oisin(1899), Yeats uses a prosaic rhythm that does not adhere to the regular verse that was abundant in the late nineteenth century.[6] In my book titled Traditional Medicine in the Irish Literary Revival: The Works of W. B. Yeats, Augusta Gregory, and J. M. Synge (2025), I frame the often negatively-applied word of ‘wandering’ as a literary technique that Yeats uses in order to metaphorically heal a wounded Ireland. Returning to The Spiritual Canticle, John also appears to metaphorically wander albeit within the form that he has set for himself. This mimics his actual situation at the time of thinking and writing. John is physically imprisoned, yet his mind is not prevented from wandering and thinking freely about his Beloved who is God Himself.
As the final eight stanzas were written after John’s escape from imprisonment, this may explain why the final line of the final stanza appears to stand out from others due to the emphasis on the final word ‘descended,’ which is given its own syntactic unit (a linguistic building block that is used in language) in the line (stanza 40).[7] The final two lines of the poem read, ‘And the cavalry / At the sight of the waters, descended’ (stanza 40). This canticle is composed of love songs between the bride of Christ and Christ the Bridegroom. In a commentary on this canticle, Kieran Kavanaugh writes that the soul says that the cavalry (which is a metaphor for a sensory part that has faculties) specifically descended (rather than embody some other form of movement) to highlight that ‘in this share which the sensory part has in the spiritual communication, when the soul tastes this drink of spiritual goods, the senses discontinue their natural operations and go down from them to spiritual recollection.’[8] John’s poem itself appears to echo the active prayer of recollection, which can lead to God’s gift of contemplation that is bestowed upon the passive human recipient, and it is most likely a product of John’s own private prayer that he conducted whilst in his detainment. In the physical space in which he was imprisoned, John could connect with the cell of himself in which he dwelt in union with God.
St John’s Theological and Poetic Imagination
In order to paint a picture of John’s theological imagination, which he often presented in poetry, it is essential to look at The Spiritual Canticle specifically in terms of hiddenness. Therefore, I will briefly illumine each key part that pertains to the theme of hiddenness or includes the imagery of privacy. From the poem’s outset, the bride asks, ‘Where have you hidden, / Beloved, and left me mourning?’ (stanza 1). This question frames a key journey in the poem, where the bride embarks upon seeking the Bridegroom. In his commentary on The Spiritual Canticle, Kieran Kavanaugh points out that the forty stanzas chronologically mirror the three ways (which are also referred to as the ‘Triple Way’ or the ‘Threefold Path’) or stages of the spiritual life: the Purgative, Illuminative, and Unitive Ways.[9] In brief summary, the Purgative Way is a fixing of paralysing obstacles that are diagnosed in a person’s life; the Illuminative Way is a shift from ‘discursive meditation and active self-discipline to a more contemplative form of prayer and self-possession,’ and the Unitive Way ‘represents the completion of the transformative process of conformity of the person’s life to that of God’s.’[10] Therefore, John’s stanzas can be grouped and categorised in three ways as the first ones equate with the Purgative Way, the subsequent ones align with the Illuminative Way, and the final stanzas belong to the Unitive Way.[11]The stanzas themselves are therefore signposts of the spiritual life at its different points.
A Hidden and Holy Hiddenness
Hiddenness is a key to God. How so? In response to the question in the poem about finding the hidden Bridegroom, Kieran Kavanaugh poses a potential query: ‘Since He Whom my soul loves is within me, why don’t I find Him or experience Him?’[12] Kavanaugh quickly responds that ‘[t]he reason is that He remains concealed and you do not also conceal yourself in order to encounter and experience Him’ and ‘[a]nyone who is to find a hidden treasure must enter the hiding place secretly, and once he has discovered it, he will also be hidden just as the treasure is hidden.’[13] Other references to hiddenness include the bride’s imperative commands to ‘[r]eveal Your presence’ (stanza 11) and then paradoxically ‘[h]ide Yourself, my Love’ (stanza 19). The bride also states that if she is ‘no longer / Seen or found on the common,’ the Bridegroom ‘will say that I am lost; / That, stricken by love, / I lost myself, and was found’ (stanza 29). The Bridegroom’s responses on hiddenness appear to be hidden. It seems that the Bridegroom alludes to solitude as a potential space for hiddenness as ‘[s]he lived in solitude, / And now in solitude has built her nest’ (stanza 35). The second half of stanza five is an answer to the bride’s solitude, which the Bridegroom here describes, and therefore the Bridegroom responds to the bride’s solitude with Himself: ‘And in solitude He guides her, / He alone, Who also bears / In solitude the wound of love’ (stanza 35). Hiddenness is a significant hermeneutic, a way of living and being, that gives one the space to be alone with Christ and enjoy His presence.
Where Poetry meets Theology
Through the art of poetry, John effectively conveys the concept and charism of hiddenness as a path to God. This hiddenness can be sought in prayerful spaces. For John, the space in which he imagines and subsequently creates his poetry is unfortunately in the context of imprisonment. God, however, brought goodness out of the evil that John experiences at the hands of his fellow Carmelite brothers. As with Joseph in the Old Testament, whose brothers betrayed him and left him to die, John uses his surroundings to allow God (who chooses John first) to draw him to Himself. In the words of the bride and her companions in The Song of Solomon 1:4, ‘Draw me after you, let us make haste.’[14] In the Gospel of John 15:16, Jesus says ‘[y]ou did not choose me, but I chose you and appointed you that you should go and bear fruit and that your fruit should abide; so that whatever you ask the Father in my name, he may give it to you.’[15] In Genesis 50:20, Joseph is recorded as saying to his repentant brothers that ‘[a]s for you, you meant evil against me; but God meant it for good, to bring it about that many people should be kept alive, as they are today.’[16] God perhaps uses John’s experience so that, through his writing, many others are helped in their spiritual lives. John’s canonisation and doctorate mean that his works are widely known across the world and are confirmed as eminent doctrine (eminentia doctrinae). The private space led to a public platform. Let us think of the ways that we can enter into hiddenness and meet God in our own lives. It is helpful to find a personal space that is conducive to prayer, silence, and solitude. This could be in a church, a prayer corner in the home, or even in one’s own room. This place can be a Carmelite-like cell for the soul in which one can practice recollection and perhaps even receive the gift of contemplation. Hiddenness can also be found in our own vocations as a personal call from God that only we and the Lord can truly understand. It is in hiding that we meet God and, in meeting God, also meet ourselves and realise who God created us to be.
[1] Kieran Kavanaugh, ‘Introduction to The Spiritual Canticle,’ in The Collected Works of St John of the Cross, trans. Kieran Kavanaugh and Otilio Rodriguez (ICS Publications, 1979), 399.
[2] Ibid.
[3] Luis Manuel Girón-Negrón, ‘Paradoxes of Desire in St John of the Cross and Solomon Ibn Gabirol,’ in The Wiley Blackwell Companion to Comparative Literature: A (John Wiley & Sons, 2023), 362.
[4] Ibid., 349.
[5] For more information, see my own book: Walker-Dunseith, Holly May. Traditional Medicine in the Irish Literary Revival: The Works of W. B. Yeats, Augusta Gregory, and J. M. Synge (Palgrave Macmillan, 2025), 18.
[6] Ibid., 29.
[7] All poetry quotations are from The Collected Works of St John of the Cross, trans. Kieran Kavanaugh and Otilio Rodriguez (ICS Publications, 1979), 410-15.
[8] Kieran Kavanaugh, ‘The beginning of a commentary on the love songs between the bride and Christ, the Bridegroom,’ in The Collected Works of St John of the Cross, trans. Kieran Kavanaugh and Otilio Rodriguez (ICS Publications, 1979), 565.
[9] Ibid., ‘The Theme,’ 415; Peter Tyler, ‘Triple Way,’ in The New SCM Dictionary of Christian Spirituality, ed., Philip Sheldrake (SCM Press, 2005), 626.
[10] David Perrin, ‘The Purgative Way,’ in The New SCM Dictionary of Christian Spirituality, ed., Philip Sheldrake (SCM Press, 2005), 517; David Perrin, ‘The Illuminative Way,’ in The New SCM Dictionary of Christian Spirituality, ed. Philip Sheldrake (SCM Press, 2005), 357; David Perrin, ‘The Unitive Way,’ in The New SCM Dictionary of Christian Spirituality, ed. Philip Sheldrake (SCM Press, 2005), 629.
[11] Kieran Kavanaugh, ‘The Theme,’ in The Collected Works of St John of the Cross, trans. Kieran Kavanaugh and Otilio Rodriguez (ICS Publications, 1979), 415.
[12] Kieran Kavanaugh, ‘The beginning of a commentary on the love songs between the bride and Christ, the Bridegroom,’ in The Collected Works of St John of the Cross, trans. Kieran Kavanaugh and Otilio Rodriguez (ICS Publications, 1979), 419.
[13] Ibid.
[14] This Bible reference is from The Ignatius Catholic Study Bible: Revised Standard Version: Second Catholic Edition, ed. Scott Hahn, co-ed. Curtis J. Mitch (Ignatius Press, 2024).
[15] This Bible reference is from The Ignatius Catholic Study Bible: Revised Standard Version: Second Catholic Edition, ed. Scott Hahn, co-ed. Curtis J. Mitch (Ignatius Press, 2024).
[16] This Bible reference is from The Ignatius Catholic Study Bible: Revised Standard Version: Second Catholic Edition, ed. Scott Hahn, co-ed. Curtis J. Mitch (Ignatius Press, 2024).
