Climbing to God on “The Burning Ladder”

Abstract

Abstract Christian existentialism is a stepping stool by which we can approach Dana Gioia’s poems of doubt. Such poems—and here we will consider just one, “The Burning Ladder”—contain “an essentially religious irruption and claim, an agony of faith, the cry of the subjectivity towards its God,” and evince “a revelation of the person and of his anguish in the face of the nothingness which is non-being in the existent, the ‘crack in the existent’ ”; read alongside crucial works of Christian existentialism and mysticism, Gioia’s poem reveals these cracks as rungs on which the faithful lover can climb to God.