Steps to the Temple by Richard Crashaw

First published: 1646; revised, 1648

Type of work: Poetry

The Work:

The 1646 edition of Richard Crashaw’s Steps to the Temple, apparently edited by the anonymous author of the preface, also includes a section of secular poems called “The Delights of the Muses,” equivalent to another volume. The 1648 edition contains revisions of some of the originals and many new poems, including “The Flaming Heart,” a famous poem about Saint Teresa of Ávila in Spain and her mystical religious ecstasy. This discussion will focus on the sacred poems composing the first edition.

The central, unifying metaphor of the title was based on a collection of poems called The Temple (1633) by Welsh poet George Herbert. Crashaw’s modification of Herbert’s title invites comparison between the two poets; indeed, Crashaw included in his volume the poem “On Mr George Herbert’s Book entitled ’The Temple of Sacred Poems.’” In this poem, Crashaw poses as a donor of Herbert’s book to a lovely, pious woman. The poem tells the lady reader that she will, by reading the lines, kindle in herself the fire that lies in the words of the meditational poems. Unlocking the secrets of the poems will be like finding an angel and grasping its wings. This angel will transport the perceptive reader daily to heaven, where she can become acquainted with the glories that await her among the gentle souls residing there.

The simple eighteen-line poem, written in rhymed iambic tetrameter couplets, ends with a strange act of appropriation: Crashaw says that the poems in the book, as he gives them to the lady, actually belong to him rather than to Herbert, under whose name they appear. This paradox combines many of the tensions that appear throughout the poetry of Crashaw’s entire career. It merges the heavenly and the inspirational with the earthly and the physical. His earthly admiration of the lady, a kind of love, finds its high fulfillment in his homage to her spirit and his attempt to help it strive toward ultimate bliss. The paradox also allows Crashaw to place himself in a tradition of meditative poetry and to choose his own literary precursor.

Even though the subject matter of Herbert’s and Crashaw’s poems was similar, the two were well distinguished in their styles. Herbert’s faith was filled with daily drama and grounded in concrete, mundane experience. In a tone of intimacy, he spoke directly and honestly with his God, trying to discover God’s will. Crashaw’s poetry, at the other extreme, was lofty, elevated, and elaborate in diction and in situation.

Some of the difference may stem from religious influence. Although both were associated with Little Gidding, a High Church Anglican place of retreat, Herbert was famous as a country minister, having taken orders in the Church of England in 1630. Crashaw, while raised by a staunch Protestant father, was drawn to the ritual, color, and tradition of Roman Catholicism and converted, probably by 1645, after also having taken orders in the Church of England seven years earlier (1638). During his stays in Paris and Rome, after leaving Cambridge shortly before it was visited by Cromwellian anti-Royalist forces, Crashaw also became influenced by a continental and anti-Reformationist strain of thought and art. The qualities of Roman Catholic meaning and matter in his poetry and his tie to continental style mark Crashaw’s poetry as unique in England during this period.

The anonymous writer of the preface to the sacred poems of Crashaw indicates that they are the document of an extraordinary man. The title is apt, this writer maintains, because Crashaw lived his life literally and metaphorically on the steps to the temple. The poems are presented as a key to Crashaw’s own holy life and as a link whereby the reader might achieve a similar intensity of religious devotion. Crashaw is to lead the reader up the steps to the temple; his poems are to participate in the spirit of Scripture. They are to be as inspiring in their turn as the Psalms and other meditational matters that they translate or emulate.

Although Crashaw’s style is unique, he also synthesizes many of the poetic trends of the seventeenth century. At various times he is master equally of the plain style, the classical imitation, and the metaphysical mode, which he inherited from poets such as John Donne. Crashaw, like the metaphysical poets, employs the poem as a form of creation; within its lines, paradoxes, or mutually exclusive realities, can be proven true. However, Crashaw exhibits little of the cynicism of his predecessors; his poems often strive for a mystical transformation, of unity with God through the medium of the poem. As vehicles of meditative transformation, the poems draw from a tradition of contemplation of a sacred image for inspiration.

This guise of imagistic contemplation has several effects. First, Crashaw’s poems do not resist flowery and extended description as a way of achieving the sensory intensity of the image. Because Crashaw seems to have a propensity for using the physical details of the body’s experience of holiness, these poems are packed with tears, blood, wounds, milk, water, and wine. This exuberance of detail led some to term Crashaw’s poetry baroque, ornate, rococo, and excessive. Because it is possible to discover actual paintings and sculptures upon which certain of his poems were based, critics also began to use the vocabulary of the plastic arts to describe Crashaw’s poetic artistry. His imagistic intensity led many to compare his poetry to painting, sculpture, and music and label it with terms by which these arts are categorized, such as “mannerist.” Crashaw’s complexity has been contextualized richly in the light of the artistic movements of his time.

Steps to the Temple begins with a translation of a portion of a long poem by Neapolitan Giambattista Marino called “Sospetto d’Herode” (“The Suspicion of Herod”). In Crashaw’s translation, this poem appears to be a hybrid of Dante Alighieri’s inferno (from the early Renaissance in Italy) and John Milton’s Paradise Lost (1667, 1674). In Crashaw’s poem, Satan, knowing that the birth of Christ will conquer Death, sends Alecto, one of the classical Furies, to stir Herod Antipas, ruler of Galilee, into a frenzy in order to vex if not to hinder the birth of Jesus under his jurisdiction. The eight-line narrative stanzas are in iambic pentameter with an abababcc rhyme scheme.

Most notable about this translation is the vivid picture painted of Satan. Stanza after stanza visualizes his situation, while Crashaw enlivens his portrait with an interior monologue, giving the reader a glimpse of the psychological and cognitive processes of the Devil. Snakes, flames, horns, chains, red eyes, black nostrils, blue lips, spacious dark wings, groans, stench, gnashing of teeth, lashing of tail—these physical manifestations set the scene for his mental pondering of God’s planned benevolent pattern of history and Lucifer’s ultimately insignificant role as a character in that plan.

Lucifer is cast in semiheroic terms, as one who exhibits an individualistic will to strive and to dare. He feels himself in painful conflict with God, a regent of a rival kingdom. His thoughts stimulate him to act against the impending birth of Christ, for he feels he will lose even the pale prize he earned after his rebellion in heaven, the rule over his own nether world, for Christ will render Death an impermanent state through his capacity to save and to redeem the souls of humanity. The translation of book 1 of this poem ends with a stunning irony, that the power of Christ is cloaked in humility, in the modesty of the human form, and with the homage of rude stable beasts.

Other translations in the collection include the famous Twenty-third Psalm, which begins with the words “The Lord is my Shepherd.” Crashaw recasts this song as rhymed iambic tetrameter couplets filled with rich sensory images. He animates the pastoral landscape by personifying spring and death and by having the elements of the natural scene partake of human qualities and actions, such as weeping, sweating, and breathing. By the end of the poem, Crashaw turns dying into an act of loving. Rather than a goal of simply to “dwell in the house of the Lord forever,” the speaker in this translation will merge with Death as with a lover, after sating on balm and nectar specifically rather than the more traditional image of the brimming cup.

Psalm 137 is also translated, and the collection has a long section of epigrams based on Scripture and on events in the life of Christ. These epigrams range from two-lined rhymed couplets in iambic pentameter to a twenty-six-line sequence of rhymed iambic tetrameter couplets, Crashaw’s preferred meter, meditating on Matthew 22:46.

The best and most famous poem among the epigrams is “On the Wounds of Our Crucified Lord.” This poem is typical of Crashaw, simultaneously metaphysical and baroque. The metaphysical element consists of the elaborate conceit (or metaphorical “concept”), evidenced by the many levels on which the wounds of Christ are interpreted as eyes or as mouths, resulting in an impossible transformational truth: “This foot hath got a mouth and lips, . . . [and]/ To pay thy tears, an eye that weeps.” By the end of the poem, the worshiper who weeps pearly, watery tears for the suffering of Christ is repaid by Christ with reciprocal tears from the wounded foot, tears of saving blood called ruby drops. The baroque quality of this poem is its almost unsavory, excessive dwelling on the physicality of the conceit. That the metaphor is unusual and far-fetched is metaphysical, but that it is extended beyond all predictable limits is baroque.

“On a Treatise of Charity” is a poem that tries to reclaim the original state of the true religion. It is, in fact, addressed to religion personified as a beautiful maiden. The poet entreats the maiden to brush away the dust of human perception that dims and alters her true beauty and to take her place as queen served by the handmaiden Charity (used in the sense of the Latin root, caritas, or love). The middle of the poem changes abruptly in tone, becoming a call to action and transforming the poem into a treatise considering the relative merits of the primacy of individual faith, as the Protestant Reformation proposed, as opposed to the Catholic and Anglican stress on the primacy of good works, bolstered by faith. Archbishop Laud led the latter faction, advocating both love and social works, to animate charity by redeeming “virtue to action.” Crashaw ends this poem with an atypically sarcastic comment, that the definition of a Protestant is simply a person who hates the pope. This movement toward a return to Catholic ways marks the biographical path of Crashaw’s life and testifies to his poetry as indeed the literary and the spiritual document of an extraordinary Englishman.

Bibliography

Bertonasco, Marc F. Crashaw and the Baroque. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1971. Considers meditative exercises and the baroque style. Includes a helpful bibliographical essay surveying twentieth century criticism of Crashaw.

Bloom, Harold, ed. John Donne and the Metaphysical Poets. New York: Bloom’s Literary Criticism, 2008. Contains criticism written from the seventeenth through twentieth centuries about the work of Crashaw and four other Metaphysical poets.

Low, Anthony. “Richard Crashaw.” The Cambridge Companion to English Poetry, Donne to Marvell, edited by Thomas N. Corns. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1993. Most of the fourteen essays focus on the work of individual poets, including Low’s article about Crashaw. Other essays provide context for these poets’ work by discussing politics, religion, gender politics, genre, and tradition in the early seventeenth century.

Parrish, Paul A. Richard Crashaw. Boston: Twayne, 1980. One of the best places to begin a study of Crashaw. Surveys Crashaw’s life and the historical and cultural context of his poetry, provides close readings of his poems, and includes a thorough bibliography.

Reid, David. The Metaphysical Poets. Harlow, England: Longman, 2000. Chapter 3 focuses on Crashaw, discussing his life and his poetry and interpreting his work from the perspective of metaphysical poetry.

Roberts, Lorraine M. “Crashaw’s Sacred Voice: ’A Commerce of Contrary Powers.’” In New Perspectives on the Life and Art of Richard Crashaw, edited by John R. Roberts. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1990. Argues that the sacred poems are not personal or mystical; instead, Crashaw creates an objectified voice that can witness artistic renderings of religious events.

Roberts, Lorraine M., and John R. Roberts. “Crashavian Criticism: A Brief Interpretive History.” In New Perspectives on the Life and Art of Richard Crashaw, edited by John R. Roberts. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1990. A valuable outline and evaluation of criticism of Crashaw’s work, beginning in the seventeenth century. Types of criticism are helpfully grouped together.

Sabine, Maureen. Feminine Engendered Faith: The Poetry of John Donne and Richard Crashaw. London: Macmillan Academic and Professional, 1992. Sabine argues that devotion to the Virgin Mary is an important link between the two poets. She analyzes the poems they wrote to and about women to find evidence of their common devotion.

Young, R. V. Doctrine and Devotion in Seventeenth-Century Poetry: Studies in Donne, Herbert, Crashaw, and Vaughan. Rochester, N.Y.: D. S. Brewer, 2000. Interprets the poetry of Crashaw and the other writers from the perspective of continental Catholic devotional literature and theology, arguing that these British poets’ work is not rigidly Protestant.