John of the Cross's Mystical Poetics and The End of the Poem

"Words mediate what word cannot express,the flesh reveals what bodily eyes cannotsee."            Francis Clooney

Seeing Through Texts

In his essay "The End of the Poem," the philosopher Giorgio Agamben examines not just the last verse where a poem formally ends, but the rationale of poetry itself. Taking as a point of departure Paul Valery's definition of poetry as "the prolonged hesitation between sound and sense," Agamben identifies sound and sense respectively with the semantic and semiotic currents that traverse a poem as a linguistic unit. While tending towards each other, sound and sense can never coincide within a poetic structure, but their creative tension, their impossibility of union, produces the very substance of poetry. A verse, Agamben concludes, "is the being that dwells in the schism," sustained by its own impossibility of fulfillment (110).

Such an inherent quality of poetry of existing in the tension between form and meaning is marked, according to Agamben, by the poetic device known as enjambment. Allowing an idea to progress from one verse into the next without a prosodic pause, the enjambment transcends the limits of meter. The reader, missing the syntactic gap, finds the completion of an idea in the next line. However, even though the enjambment allows for the sense to transcend the sound between verses or stanzas, it remains incomplete when it occurs in the last line of a poem, where no following verse is left for the reader to have recourse to. Confronting the impossibility of such enjambment, and with it of poetic closure, Agamben suggests two possible responses to the question of what happens when a poem ends. First, one should consider the "mystical marriage of sound and sense" (114); that is, the attainment of the goal of poetry beyond the body of the poem. Second, sound and sense may remain forever separated, as if in "a theological conspiracy against language" (114). Lastly, Agamben posits a third alternative: the tension between sound and sense, instead of ceasing, lingers on beyond the last line of the poem as if in an "endless falling" (115). Semiotics and semantics, in that case, neither unite nor remain apart, but persist in an elongated proximity without ever consummating their encounter.

This essay proposes a twofold endeavor. While using Agamben's ideas as a lens through which to read the mystical poem Cántico espiritual, by the sixteenth-century Spanish poet and theologian John of the Cross, I deploy John of the Cross's mystical poetics to reexamine Agamben's thoughts about the function of enjambment and the end—or the many ends—of a poem. Even though Agamben maintains a strict philosophical-literary perspective, he also acknowledges the theological foundation of poetic language, the "unquestionable bond of speech and life" inherited by Western literature from Christian theology.² In examining what is meant theologically by the end of a poem, this essay reframes Agamben's philosophical inquiry into the realm of theopoetics at which he points.³

The poem Cántico espiritual, originally entitled Canciones entre el alma y el esposo, is the first of John of the Cross's three main poetic compositions, to which he added commentaries.⁴ Inspired by the Biblical Song of Songs and influenced by the tradition of mystical theology, the Cántico recreates the metaphor of a female lover (amada) and her male lover (amado) to illustrate the soul's relationship with God. In the prologue of the commentaries to his own Cántico, John of the Cross describes the function of poetic language as a rebosar, an imperfect "overflowing" of divine mysteries that will never attain their complete expression within the boundaries of language:

¿Quién podrá escribir lo que las almas amorosas, donde él mora, hace entender? Y ¿quién podrá manifestar con palabras lo que las hace sentir? Y ¿quién finalmente, lo que las hace desear? Cierto, nadie lo puede; cierto, ni ellas mismas (las almas) por quien pasa lo pueden. Porque ésta es la causa porque con figuras, comparaciones y semejanzas, antes rebosan algo de lo...