My dissertation on queer mysticism continues by telling the story of St. John of the Cross, a sixteenth century Carmelite priest who became one of the most enduring poets of Spanish literature. By connecting his poetry to the passages of Whitman’s “Calamus,” I read him as a queer mystic. In order to understand this connection, I want to provide you with a little background information, and that begins by telling the story of his imprisonment.

Though the dark, cramped atmosphere of his prison cell was torture enough, St. John of the Cross was subjected to severe and cruel punishments, including ritualistic torture: “while he knelt on the ground, the monks walked around him, scouring his bare back with their leather whips” (Barnstone 13). The scene was cruel and sadistic: “First the prior and then each of the friars would whip the bared shoulders of the little revolutionary with a short, knotted triple rope that bit into his flesh time after time. The friars who believed him most guilty put all their force into their one blow. Others, who believed that they were treating Father John too harshly, felt the sting in their own hearts and bodies, and they struck him as gently as they could” (Hardy 70-71). If their goal was to get him to break his reform movement of “discalced,” or barefoot Carmelites, they would work daily to give him a taste of his own medicine. Eventually his captors limited their torture to Fridays. Nonetheless, the practice left John permanently disfigured. The rest of his days were spent dismally enough, as John would be fed scraps that would make him suffer from dysentery, and his clothes would be infested with lice. 

John broke away from his prison nine months later, in August 1577. He was inspired to make his escape after the Virgin Mary appeared to him in a dream, demanding that he escape. Her appearance came on the eve of the feast day that commemorated the Assumption. He had asked his jailer if he could say mass that day, but was angrily rejected. John’s dream of the Virgin reminded him of a memory from childhood, where he fell helpless into a pond. When he needed assistance, a woman resembling Virgin Mary appeared to him. But John was covered in filth from the pond and did not want to take hold of her, as the apparition was pristine in appearance. So he held out his fists; they would be less dirty than the rest of his hands. Suddenly, he was saved from the pond; John never forgot the Virgin Mary’s help. Feeling empowered by her reappearance in the dream, John loosened the bolts to his prison door, slowly, over the two nights to come. On the third day, the bolts were loosened enough for him to sneak past the guards and make his way to freedom. 

John first found refuge with the Discalced Carmelites, and while recovering, he would dictate his poetry to a scribe in the convent. It is unclear whether or not he escaped with the original poems that he wrote in prison, but we are certain that they were drafted while he was there. Six months into his imprisonment, John was given access to materials that would help him in his devotional practice: a thread and needle to mend his garments, and a pen and paper with which to write religious verse. This latter gift would help yield the lines that would become his poems. According to his first biographer, Jerónimo de San José, John was inspired by a villancio, or love song, that he heard being sung from the street. Its words translated to: “I am dying of love, dearest. What shall I do? — Die” (Brenan 32). This experience would stay with John throughout his life as a sustaining image of redemption, one that would inspire his concept of the “ascent” to perfection in his theological treatise The Ascent of Mount Carmel. Reflecting other late medieval mystics, John will refer to his imprisonment as a state of “dryness,” one that will eventually be satiated through union with the divine. But at the time, John was only able to muster the energy for more economical modes of expression, for poetry. And his poems would borrow from both the image of “dying of love,” but being imprisoned with the inevitability of escape. 

One of his central poems, “Noche Oscura,” translated hereafter as “Dark Night,” borrows from his experience in prison. The title’s adjective, “oscura,” primarily means “dark,” but in Willis Barnstone’s translation, it also means “secret” (39). These twin concepts tell readers that the night is not only dark, but clandestine. The night is populated by a speaker who is “starving for love and deep in flame” (39). Upon making his escape, the lover says “my house at last was calm and safe,” as if the flames of love burned so brightly that they threatened to engulf his house (39). But the lover’s escape is “a escuras,” or “in darkness” or blackness; his celebration speaks to the fact that no one saw him escape. This blackness comes at a price, as the lover says “I saw nothing then, no other light to mark the way but fire pounding my heart” (39). The pounding flame was the guide that helped the lover on. But to whom? It appeared that “nobody appeared to come” (39). It is then that the night did its work to join together “lover and the loved one, loved one in the lover fused as one” (39). 

In the final three stanzas of the poem, while his beloved is said to be sleeping, the lover “caressed and fondled” his beloved’s “flowering breasts” (39). As with Whitman, this moment of caress could be considered a masturbatory action, as the lover has dissolved into “nobody.” Also with Whitman, the whole earth mimics the motions of his lover’s neck. In John’s poem, the wind, which shakes the cedar trees that lie above him and his lover, “wounds” his neck as he plays with the beloved’s hair (41). In this moment of reverie, the lover claims that he “forgot [his] being” (41). To say that he forgot means that “all ceased” and that he “left [his] being” (41). And in the end, he witnesses the most miraculous thing of all, in which all of his “cares” disappeared “among the lilies far away” (41). 

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In the coming weeks, I’ll share more of how I tie the “Dark Night” poem to Whitman, and queer mysticism in general. Stay tuned!