The Poetry of Crashaw by Richard Crashaw

First published:Steps to the Temple, 1646; Carmen deo Nostro, 1652

Critical Evaluation:

The highly emotional, ornate, baroque style that characterized the painting, sculpture, and some of the poetry of seventeenth century France and Italy had little influence on most English creative artists, but the poet Richard Crashaw was a notable exception. Writing about the same time that Suckling, Lovelace, and Carew were celebrating the beauty of ladies of the court in light, polished, witty verses, Crashaw attempted to express in his poetry his impression of the glories of the Christian faith. Unlike the religious poems of Donne and Herbert, which give intellectual, highly personal accounts of the poets’ struggles for faith in language and rhythms close to ordinary speech, Crashaw’s works are generally diffuse, impassioned reflections on the life of Christ and the symbols of the Christian church. Whatever problems he may have encountered in moving from the Puritan faith of his clergyman father to the Roman Catholicism he adopted near the end of his life are subordinated to the almost mystical fervor of his devotional spirit.

The dominant tone of Crashaw’s poetry is rhapsodic; he makes frequent use of hyperbole, personification, and direct address to sustain his high emotional pitch. Typical are the opening lines of his version of the Twenty-Third Psalm:

Happy me! o happy sheep!Whom my God vouchsafes to keep;Even my God, even he it isThat points me to these ways of bliss;

Still more ecstatic is the hymn “To the Name above Every Name, the Name of Jesus,” in which the poet calls on his soul to unite the whole universe in singing the praises of Christ:

I sing the Name which None can sayBut touch’t with an interiour Ray:The Name of our New Peace; ourGood:Our Bliss: and Supernaturall Blood:The Name of All our Lives and Loves.

One of Crashaw’s most powerful methods of conveying the intensity of his religious feeling is his use of erotic language, a device he may have learned from Donne. Near the end of “The Flaming Heart,” written, the poet explains, “upon the book and picture of the seraphical Saint Teresa,” Crashaw addresses the saint, begging her to break into his heart “and take away from me myself and sin”:

O thou undaunted daughter of desires!By all thy dower of Lights and Fires;By all the eagle in thee, all the dove;By all thy lives and deaths of love;By thy large draughts of intellectualday,And by thy thirsts of love more largethan they;By all thy brim-filled Bowls of fiercedesire;By thy last Morning’s draught of liquidfire;By the full kingdom of that final kissThat seiz’d thy parting Soul, and seal’dthee his . . .By all of Him we have in Thee;Leave nothing of my Self in me.

Even more striking for its use of the vocabulary of romance is the hymn “In the Glorious Assumption of our Blessed Lady,” where the Holy Spirit calls Mary to Him:

Hark, how the dear immortal doveSighs to his silver mate rise up, my love!Rise up, my fair, my spotless one!The winter’s past, the rain is gone.The spring is come, the flowers ap-pearNo sweets, but thou, are wanting here.

Certain words and images occur again and again in Crashaw’s works. He seems to have been almost obsessed with blood, tears, milk, gold, silver, pearls, diamonds, and stars, and he forms surprising associations between images that seem on the surface quite dissimilar. In one of his most famous and most extravagant poems, “The Weeper,” he addresses the tears of Mary Magdalene:

Upwards thou dost weep;Heaven’s bosom drinks the gentlestream.Where th’ milky rivers creep,Thine floates above; and is thecream.Waters above the Heavens, what theybe,We’are taught best by thy Tears andthee.

Through the thirty-odd stanzas of the poem these tears are described as the proudest pearls of Sorrow, Angels’ wine, golden streams, and fair floods; Crashaw’s flow of images was apparently inexhaustible, but it occasionally betrayed him into verses which move across the line separating the sublime from the ludicrous, as when he calls Mary’s eyes “two walking baths; two weeping motions; portable, and compendious oceans.”

The spilling of Christ’s blood at the Crucifixion inspired a number of similar strange, paradoxical images, some successful, some less so. Crashaw’s fondness for developing one conceit out of another, and the tortuous routes his imagination sometimes took, can be seen particularly clearly in “On the Wounds of our crucified Lord,” a poem which is typical of certain aspects of his style, though it is by no means one of his better works:

O these wakeful wounds of thine!Are they Mouthes? or are they eyes?Be they Mouthes, or be they eyne,Each bleeding part some one supplies.Lo! a mouth, whose full-bloom’d lipsAt too dear a rate are roses.Lo! a blood-shot eye! that weepsAnd many a cruel tear discloses.O thou that on this foot hast laidMany a kiss, and many a Tear,Now thou shalt have all repaid,Whatsoe’er thy charges were.This foot hath got a Mouth and lips,To pay the sweet sum of thy kisses;To pay thy Tears, an Eye that weepsIn stead of Tears such Gems as thisis.The difference only this appears,(Nor can the change offend)The debt is paid in Ruby-Tears,Which thou in Pearls didst lend.

Crashaw was generally more successful when he restrained his fondness for unusual images and comparisons, and he wrote several works that are appealing in their relative simplicity—even though his poetry could never be called completely unadorned. In the “Hymne of the Nativity, sung by the Shepheardes,” the poet seems to have been striving for the innocent, childlike quality of medieval verses on the same subject:

We saw thee in thy Balmy Nest,Bright Dawn of our Eternal Day;We saw thine Eyes break from the East,And chase the trembling shadesaway:We saw thee (and we blessed thesight)We saw thee by thine own sweet Light.I saw the curl’d drops, soft and slowCome hovering o’er the places head,Off’ring their whitest sheets of snow,To furnish the fair Infants Bed.Forbear (said I) be not too bold,Your fleece is white, but ’tis too cold.

Even in this poem Crashaw could not resist bringing in his favorite images:

Welcome, though not to Gold, nor Silk,To more than Caesar’s Birthright is.Two sister-Seas of virgins Milk,With many a rarely-temper’d kiss,That breathes at once both Maid andMother,Warms in the one, cools in the other.

The longest work in Crashaw’s first major volume of poetry, STEPS TO THE TEMPLE, published in 1646, is the SOSPETTO D’HERODE, a translation of the first book of an epic poem on the Massacre of the Innocents by the Italian baroque poet, Marino. The narrative opens in Hell, where Satan ponders the coming birth of Christ and plots against God. Crashaw seems to have modeled his description of the devil on the monsters of Spenser’s THE FAERIE QUEENE:

His flaming Eyes dire exhalation,Unto a dreadful pile gives fiery Breath;Whose unconsum’d consumption preysuponThe never-dying Life, of a long Death.In this sad House of slow Destruction,(His shop of flames) he frys himself,beneathA mass of woes, his Teeth for Tor-ment gnash,While his steel sides sound with hisTail’s strong lash.

Some passages of this poem are interesting as forerunners of the opening books of PARADISE LOST, and they reveal in Crashaw an unexpected control of language and dialogue that some of his more extravagant lyrics would not suggest:

He has my Heaven (what would hemore?) whose brightAnd radiant Scepter this bold handshould beare.And for the never-fading fields of LightMy fair Inheritance, he confines mehere,To this dark House of shades, horror,and Night,To draw a long-liv’d Death, where allmy cheerIs the solemnity my sorrow wears,That Mankinds Torment waits uponmy Tears.

One of the Furies is sent up from hell to enlist the help of King Herod in Satan’s battle against man, and the book ends with her exhortation to the king, a call to violence strongly reminiscent of Lady Macbeth’s plea for Duncan’s murder:

Where art thou man? What cowardlymistakeOf thy great self, hath stolen KingHerod from thee?O call thyself home to thy self, wake,wake,And fence the hanging sword Heaventhrows upon thee.Redeem a worthy wrath, rouse thee,and shakeThy self into a shape that may becomethee.Be Herod, and thou shalt not missfrom meImmortal stings to thy great thoughts,and thee.

Crashaw published with the STEPS TO THE TEMPLE a collection of nonreligious poetry which he called “The Delights of the Muses.” These poems reveal a number of new facets of his talents. One of the best of all his works is “Music’s Duel,” a poem particularly remarkable for the skill with which the poet has manipulated his rhythm and diction to create the most musical effect possible. The poem describes a contest between a lute player and a nightingale; the bird perishes as she tries to equal the beauty of the notes that flow from the instrument. Crashaw captures many moods and tones as he describes the various songs of the lute and the bird. At one point the instrument strikes a martial note:

. . . as when the Trumpets callHot Mars to th’ Harvest of Death’sfield, and wooMen’s hearts into their hands; thislesson, too,She gives him back; her supple Breastthrills outSharp Airs, and staggers in a warblingdoubtOf dallying sweetness.

The poem concludes with a charming brief epitaph for the nightingale:

She dies; and leaves her life the Victor’sprize,Falling upon his Lute; o fit to have(That liv’d so sweetly) dead, so sweeta Grave!

This volume included a number of other poems in genres popular at the time: elegies on friends and acquaintances from the university; a panegyric on the birth of the king’s second son, the Duke of York; witty, brief epigrams; and even a Cavalier love lyric, the “Wishes to his supposed Mistress.” The short stanza form and the clarity of the diction of this latter poem make it one of Crashaw’s most appealing, though his catalogue of those beauties he desires for his mistress is unquestionably too long. The poem begins:

Who ere she be,That not impossible sheThat shall command my heart and me;Where ere she lie,Lock’t up from mortal Eye,In shady leaves of Destiny:Till that ripe BirthOf studied fate stand forth,And teach her fair steps to our Earth . . .Meet you her my wishes,Bespeak her to my blisses,And be ye call’d my absent kisses.

Crashaw’s later poems, many of them dealing with the rituals of the Roman Catholic Church, appeared in the CARMEN DEO NOSTRO, published in 1652, three years after the death of the poet. This volume also included revisions of many of the earlier religious poems. In most cases the later works are better, more restrained, less filled with bizarre images than their predecessors, as a comparison of the poem on Christ’s wounds with these lines from “Sancta Maria Dolorum,” addressed to the Virgin as she stands at the foot of the cross, will show:

What kind of marble thenIs that cold manWho can look on and see,Nor keep such noble sorrows company?Sure even from you(My flints) some drops are dueTo see so many unkind swords contestSo fast for one soft Breast.While with a faithful, mutual, floodHer eyes bleed Tears, his wounds weepBlood.

Crashaw did not change his poetic style radically or abandon his favorite images, but he did, in many cases, gain greater control of them.

The often-praised “Hymn to Saint Teresa,” written when Crashaw was still a Protestant and published in its final form in the CARMEN DEO NOSTRO, shows surprising strength in its opening lines:

Love, thou art Absolute sole lordOf Life and Death. To prove the word,We’ll now appeal to none of allThose thy old Soldiers, Great and tall,Ripe Men of Martyrdom, . . .Spare blood and sweat;And see him [Christ] take a privateseat,Making his mansion in the mildAnd milky soul of a soft child.

The poem as a whole is a meditation upon the innocence, the virtue, and the devotion of the child saint and the inspiration she has given to men.

While Crashaw’s extravagant, often overblown imagery and the ecstatic tone of much of his poetry has little appeal for many modern readers, his work will continue to be of interest to others, both for the technical skill it reveals and for the quality of the author’s imagination. No other English poet has depicted life and faith in the terms in which Crashaw saw them, and his work gives valuable insight into that baroque spirit which played an important part in seventeenth century culture.