Love here is not just a matter of bodies; it has to happen first in the mind. The speaker says he could not love or even touch the beloved unless thought had already completed what love designed. As the two walk at dusk, that idea turns into wondering questions. Did their bodies actually move through the fading landscape, or did they go “body by body into that heavenly glow” only in thought? The starlings’ noise, the bare elms, and the silver birches gleaming like frozen masts all feel real yet also like images the mind makes in the dark. By the end, the speaker wants to rise from the outer darkness into an inner, deeper sky and find the beloved there in spirit, or not at all. The mood is intimate, uncertain, and quietly intense, as if the boundary between the world and the mind keeps slipping.
The Dark Night of the Mind — Summary
I could not love if my thought loved not too, Nor could my body touch the body of you, Unless first in the dark night of the mind Love had fulfilled what Love had well designed.
Was it in thought or flesh we walked, when low The sun dropped, and the white scar on the hill Sank into the dark trees? Could we indeed so quietly go Body by body into that heavenly glow?
The elms that rose so vast above the mill Near leafless were and still; But from the branches with such loud unease Black flocking starlings mixed their warring cries That seemed the greater noise of the creaking mill; And every branch and extreme twig was black With birds that whistled and heard and whistled back, Filling with noise as late with wings the skies. Was it their noise we heard, Or clamour of other thoughts in our quiet mind that stirred?
Then through the climbing hazel hedge new thinned By the early and rapacious wind, We saw the silver birches gleam with light Of frozen masts in seas all wild and green. O, were they truly trees, or some unseen Thought taking on an image dark and bright? And did those bodies see them, or the mind? And did those bodies face once more the hill To bathe in night, or on a darker road Our spirits unseeing unwearying rise and rise Where these feet never trod?
From that familiar outer darkness I Would rise to the inner, deeper, darker sky And find you in my spirit--or find you not, O, never, never, if not in my thought.