Dark Night of the Soul

The poem uses the night to symbolize life’s strife, the dark moments when faith is most sorely tested because God, with His promise of deliverance and love, seems most distant. The night into which the speaker steals symbolizes his willingness to engage in those tribulations, to embrace that suffering. The night remains an allegorical thing—the speaker does not qualify his predicament by contextualizing his “night.” St. John of the Cross does not share the particulars of his arrest, the agonies of his imprisonment, and the humiliation at the hands of those he knows are far less spiritual, far less worthy of God’s love. Thus, night can symbolize the emotional pain of any Christian enduring unexpected and unearned pain—the reality of illness or the approach of death, betrayal and the loss of love, economic deprivation, or any crisis of faith and doubt.

Though the poem indicates that the speaker has done nothing to justify the pain he endures, that he is a victim of persecution without cause, the enveloping dark night symbolizes how completely the speaker feels. His afflictions surround him like a starless night. But the poem, as an expression of mystical thought, alters the perception of the night in Stanza III when the forbidding dark is suddenly described as “happy” (Line 11), the term meaning not that the night itself is happy but rather that it is fortuitous that the speaker is experiencing it, because suffering alone will lead the speaker to the truest union with God.