A Reader's Edition
The Dark Night
Noche Oscura · St. John of the Cross
What this document is. "The Dark Night" (Noche Oscura) —
eight stanzas by the 16th-century Spanish Carmelite St. John of the
Cross, in David Lewis's 1864 translation, long out of copyright.
The poem is the whole of what is reproduced here; John's own prose
exposition of it — over a hundred pages explaining these forty lines,
line by line — is a genuine and separate work in its own right, not a
later editor's apparatus, but a different genre, and is not included. The
text is reproduced verbatim from the The Dark Night of the Soul, a Spiritual Canticle, and the Living Flame of Love of Saint John of the Cross, trans. David Lewis, 1908 reprint, via the Internet Archive; a fidelity
check (
fidelity_dark_night.py) diffs this edition against
that source on every build. The scan's wide inter-word spacing and one
running page header that fell mid-poem are removed, and three individual
letter-level misreadings are corrected against context — documented in
the extractor itself. Nothing here is endorsed; as with every work
in the Records, it is set down so it can be read on its own terms.
How to read this. Eight five-line stanzas, one continuous
first-person account rather than isolated sayings — read in order. Use the
search box to find a phrase and the motif chips to spotlight a theme.
Terms with a dotted underline
have a hover definition.
Part I
The Dark Night
8 stanzas
The soul's own account, in the first person, of slipping out by night from a house now stilled, guided by a burning in the heart rather than any light, to a union with the Beloved that ends the poem in oblivion.
1
In a dark night,With anxious love inflamed,O, happy lot !Forth unobserved I went,My house being now at rest.
2
In darkness and in safety.By the secret ladder, disguised,O, happy lot !In darkness and concealment,My house being now at rest,
3
In that happy night.In secret, seen of none,Seeing nought myself,Without other light or guideSave that which in my heart was burning.
4
That light guided meMore surely than the noonday sunTo the place where He was waiting for me,Whom I knew well,And where none appeared.
5
O, guiding night ;O, night more lovely than the dawn ;O, night that hast unitedThe lover with His beloved.And changed her into her love.
6
On my flowery bosom,Kept whole for Him alone.There He reposed and slept ;And I cherished Him, and the wavingOf the cedars fanned Him.
7
As His hair floated in the breezeThat from the turret blew.He struck me on the neckWith His gentle hand,And all sensation left me.
8
I continued in oblivion lost,My head was resting on my love ;Lost to all things and myself,And, amid the lilies forgotten.Threw all my cares away.
Glossary
Terms of the text, and of Legge's 1891 English. Each entry links to a chapter where the term is used.
- night
- Not a metaphor for despair here but for the whole path: unseeing and unseen, guided by a burning in the heart rather than any light, all the way to union. ch-1
- ladder
- "The secret ladder" the soul descends the house by — the same image of a structured way between worlds this library's Concordance tracks across traditions far from this one. ch-1
- beloved
- The soul's own word for the one it goes out by night to meet — the poem never names Him further than this. ch-1
- oblivion
- The state the poem actually ends in: not vision or ecstasy described, but the self simply gone, cares thrown away among forgotten lilies. ch-1