71-) English Literature
Richard Crashaw
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Poetry
Crashaw’s
English religious poems were republished in Paris in 1652 under the title
Carmen Deo Nostro (“Hymn to Our Lord”). Some of his finest lines are those
appended to “The Flaming Heart” a poem on St. Teresa of Avila.
Having
read the Italian and Spanish mystics, Crashaw reflected little of the
contemporary English metaphysical poets, adhering, rather, to the flamboyant
imagery of the continental Baroque poets. He used conceits (elaborate
metaphors) to draw analogies between the physical beauties of nature and the
spiritual significance of existence. Crashaw’s verse is marked by loose trains
of association, sensuous imagery, and eager religious emotion. The standard
text of his poems was edited by L.C. Martin (1927; rev. ed., 1957).
Reader,
we stile his Sacred Poems, Stepps to the Temple, and aptly, for in the Temple
of God, under his wing, he led his life in St. Maries Church neere St. Peters
Colledge: There he lodged under Tertullian’s roofe of Angels: There he made his
nest more gladly then David’s Swallow neere the house of God: where like a
primitive Saint, he offered more prayers in the night, then others usually
offer in the day; There, he penned these Poems, Stepps for happy soules to
climb heaven by.
Whoever
the “Authors friend” may be who wrote this “Preface to the Reader,” his
portrait made a deep impression on early-17th-century biographers of Crashaw
such as David Lloyd and Anthony Wood. Contemporary readers need to appreciate
once more that Crashaw’s poetry was first admired as an extension of his prayer
life and as the testimony of one who dwelt in the presence of God. Yet few were
the “happy soules” who could turn away from the dramatic tragedy of the 17th
century and look inward, as Crashaw does, at the “life hid with Christ in God”
(Colossians). In his finest contemplative verse, he would reach out from the
evening stillness of the sanctuary to an embattled world that was deaf to the
soothing sound of Jesus, the name which, to his mind, cradled the cosmos.
How
many unknown WORLDS there are
Of
Comforts, which Thou hast in Keeping!
How
many Thousand Mercyes there
In
Pitty’s soft lap ly a sleeping!
Happy
he who has the art
To
awake them
And
to take them
Home,
and lodge them in his HEART.
(“Hymn to the Name of Jesus”)
Despite
his artistic efforts to awaken spiritual understanding in men, Crashaw remains
perhaps the most misunderstood of 17th-century English poets. Though he happily
set out to follow in the steps of George Herbert, whose collection of sacred
English poems was titled The Temple (1633), Crashaw is usually regarded as the
incongruous younger brother of the Metaphysicals who weakens the “strong line”
of their verse or the prodigal son who “took his journey into a far country”
(Luke), namely the Continent and Catholicism. With a mind open to many
influences, Crashaw did indeed write poetry rich with “many WORLDS” (“Hymn to
the Name of Jesus”); but the most singular journey that he takes is not
abroad—it is the inner journey toward that stationary center of human activity
so memorably captured in the “Preface to the Reader.”
If
a fuller appreciation of Crashaw must address the centering activity that goes
on in his poetry, it must also explore further the volatile gender states that
paradoxically decenter his verse. Already feminist-inspired criticism has upset
the conventional wisdom that deplored Crashaw’s “feminine” sensibility, that is
to say, his ardent devotion to women and his partiality for sweet, soft, or
maternal images in his verse. The male critical preference for the tougher and
supposedly more virile stance of a poet such as John Donne has been challenged
by readers who sense that the man’s feminine ways may contain hidden power. The
deeply unsettling changes of gender perception which Crashaw encourages are
crucial to an understanding of the spiritual intention of his poetry, which is
to “unman” the narrow, orthodox mind, “narrow and low, and infinitely lesse /
Then this GREAT mornings mighty Busynes” (“Hymn to the Name of Jesus”), which
offers resistance to God and so permits his “Bright Joyes” to flood the soul.
Joy
is the base note of Crashaw’s poetry; exaltation the promised spiritual effect
of his verse. Yet, early in life, Crashaw realized that we are born “dark Sons
of Dust and Sorrow.” Just when is not clear; nor, for that matter, is the exact
date of his birth. From the devotional as well as literary importance of the
Nativity in his poetry, it is conceivable that Crashaw was born on either side
of the Christmas season—the Advent period of 1612 or the Epiphany period of
1613. Of his mother no trace survives. There is no way of knowing whether she
lingered long enough to shape his primary memories or died during or soon after
his birth, inspiring a lifetime of wishful mother thinking. The imprint of
loving maternal care at the breast and in the warm nest of a woman’s body,
however, can be strongly felt in his poetry. Of the stepmother who showed
“singular motherly affection to the child of her predecessor” there is a
record, largely thanks to the funeral tributes that were written in 1620 on her
death in childbirth. These tributes were printed together as The Honour of
Virtue, reprinted in Katherine Usher Henderson and Barbara F. McManus’s Half
Humankind (1985). The “Matchless Mistress” Elizabeth Skinner Crashaw died at
the age of 24, when the poet was about eight, and after a brief 17 months of
marriage to a man twice her age, William Crashaw. Amid the lifeless tributes to
her accomplishments as a Christian gentlewoman and new wife, Elizabeth Crashaw
emerges as a kindhearted soul who, like her stepson, “was belou’d by all;
dispraysed by none” (Thomas Car’s “Anagramme” prefacing Crashaw’s Carmen Deo
Nostro, 1652). According to the funeral sermon in The Honour of Virtue, though
“young, healthful and living in great content and with a husband after her own
heart,” Elizabeth’s pregnancy seems to have been clouded by foreboding that
childbirth would prove “both the baptism of the son and burial of the mother.”
She correctly prophesied her own death but had not foreseen that her new-born
son would soon follow her. Humbling consciousness of being “a dear-bought son,”
indeed, the only surviving child of loving parent figures, never left Crashaw
as an artist. Neither did his sense of awe and obligation to the mothers who
steeled themselves for sacrifice and were willing to face the dual ordeal of
birth and death for the sake of another. The poet would complete his
development in an exclusive male environment where strong fathers such as
William Crashaw dominated the institutions of state. According to Victor
Turner’s The Ritual Process (1969), where patrilineality is the basis of
society, as in Stuart England, the individual may form a more disinterested
concept of “human-kindness,” joining men together in a community of greater
good through the mother and, by extension, through other women and femininity.
In his mature verse, Crashaw’s poetic vision of community would reach through
the Virgin Mother and female saints up to the company of heaven and down to an
unremembered chain of women on earth. Though weakened by labor, cut down to
size by the world, and stifled by premature death, these women provided what
Turner called the crucial “human bond, without which there could be no
society,” and it is to his credit that Crashaw never forgot this basic fact.
At
the time of his stepmother’s death it was marveled that Elizabeth Crashaw could
have felt such a strong “strange affection to her husband.” William Crashaw was
a middle-aged Anglican divine from a long-established northern family. Some of
the modest income from his early parish work in the Inner Temple, London, in
Yorkshire, and finally at St. Mary Matfellon, Whitechapel, which he ministered
from 1618 until his death in 1626, undoubtedly subsidized his passion for book
collection; but a widower with a substantial library and a lonely son seemed no
match for the “young gallants and rich heirs” who hoped to join their
inheritance with Elizabeth Skinner’s estimated “great estate.” It is hard to
believe that William Crashaw’s fiery diatribes against popery or his reputation
as a Puritan sympathizer could have wooed this gentle lady; but her mourners
remarked on her admiration for the profession of clergy, her zeal for pastoral
work, and the encouragement that she gave her husband to introduce the morning
service from the Book of Common Prayer into his parish. These vestiges of the
canonical day offices said in the medieval church would become the nucleus of
meditative exercises in Crashaw’s poetry. Indeed, the magnificent invocation at
the close of one of his greatest poems recalls the “Litany of General
Supplication” that follows morning prayers and begins: “By thine Agony and
bloody Sweat; by thy Cross and Passion; by thy precious Death and Burial ...”
In “The Flaming Heart,” Crashaw’s poetic entreaty to Saint Teresa, he
consecrated all the devotion shown by women like his stepmother and joined it
to Christ’s Offering on the Cross.
Between
his stepmother’s death in 1620 and his admission to Charterhouse School in
1629, Crashaw underwent that educational regimen calculated to turn youngsters
into precocious sages modeled on the boy Christ, who discoursed to his elders
in the temple. Yet if Crashaw’s classical scholarship bears the stamp of
humanist learning, he developed no penchant for that hostility to women or
denial of a kindhearted maternal world that, according to Richard Helgerson in
The Elizabethan Prodigals (1976), characterized traditional English pedagogy;
for this he had no less surprising a figure than his own father to thank.
Though William Crashaw was a furious disputant of Catholicism and of its ardent
devotion to Mary, the Mother of God, his passion in the pulpit softened to
tenderness in the home. At his father’s encouragement Crashaw may have composed
his early verse rendition of “Psalme 23.” This juvenile exercise, written no
later than 1630 and possibly before his father’s death in 1626, is an important
link between Crashaw’s childhood, about which we know so tantalizingly little,
and the creative life which now began to unfold to him in poetry. The Psalms
gave profound instruction to Jesus himself and so were second only to the
Gospels in providing Christians edifying meditations and literary inspiration.
Psalm 23 was particularly good material for a schoolboy keen to please and
perhaps console the father who had been left his sole guardian. “The Lord is my
shepherd; I shall not want” has been the traditional comfort of those who face
bereavement and who pray for the serenity and the strength to look beyond death
to God’s everlasting life. In contrast to the somber six verses of the original
psalm, however, Crashaw composed an ornate and exuberant paraphrase of over seventy
lines which begins, “Happy me! O happy sheepe! / Whom my God vouchsafes to
keepe.” The poem does not begin with the Lord who is the shepherd but with the
sheepish, slightly ridiculous figure that Crashaw himself cuts in the world. As
an aspiring poet, Crashaw had also begun to experiment with the expanded
epigrams that are a hallmark of the Metaphysical poets; but whereas the
Metaphysical poets are noted for the controlled economy they bring to this
form, Crashaw already shows an inclination to luxuriate in rather than compress
his material. He makes the green pastures and still waters of the original
psalm pulse with the creative energy of God, which he recognized as his own
source of creativity and the one “that points me to these wayes of blisse.” In
the “cheerefull spring” of his poetic art, Crashaw had begun to employ
ebullient, fanciful, outré imagery, such as that of “the blubb’ring Mountaine”
which “Weeping, melts into a Fountaine.” It would be a mistake, however, to
conclude simply that he had picked up bad habits early in his artistic
development or that these habits were learned from his father, who showed an
excess of zeal in his own religious writings and whose Manuall for True
Catholickes (1611) can be felt as an influence in “Psalme 23.” As T.S. Eliot
was among the first to appreciate, “there is brainwork” behind the seeming
perversity and outrageousness of Crashaw’s language.
What
is crucial to a real as opposed to a formally argued appreciation of Crashaw is
a recognition that he deliberately reveled in his own weakness, for his
weakness taught him to turn inward to Christ for strength and outward to the
many guardians, his father chief among them, whom he would depend upon to
shepherd him over the course of his life. The poet who continued to babble away
in his mature verse was thus not afraid to depict the speaker in “Psalme 23” as
hopelessly ill equipped to fend for himself. God must “point” him in the right
direction, must rescue him when he in “simple weaknesse strayes, / (Tangled in
forbidden wayes).” The unquestioning faith which alienates modern readers of
his devotional verse reflects an early intuition that he had found the path of
his own bliss and that both friends and foes would show the “Way for a resolved
mind.” The Psalms were composed by David the shepherd boy. The confidence and
the trust in Crashaw’s psalm paraphrase suggest that in his own childhood the
poet may have felt David’s primitive sense of closeness to God. Certainly,
there is no fear of God or trepidation at the prospect of dying in his poem,
though his own family life could not protect him from the hurt of bereavement.
Nor does his speaker seem burdened by sin, though this has been interpreted as
incognizance by hostile readers. When one considers that the speaker depicts
himself as a silly sheep, or a foolish, wayward child, it becomes evident that
Crashaw did not see sin as wickedness so much as another form of weakness. In
the most original move of “Psalme 23,” he depicts God not only as the Good
Shepherd but also as the Good Mother who first “sings my soule to rest”; who
later feeds him in Holy Writ and in the Eucharistic bread as earlier “at her
brest”; and who finally welcomes him with open arms in death. The movement of
this poem prefigures not only the shape of Crashaw’s art but the direction of
his whole life.
It
is hard to believe that Crashaw would have shown this precocious awareness of
the feminine core of the Lord’s goodness to man had he not seen in his father
something of the motherhood of God. It is known for a fact that in William
Crashaw’s extensive theological library his son had access to the accounts of
female mystics and visionaries of the medieval church, and perhaps there this
dreamy young man first seriously reflected on the idea of Christ as protomother.
The poet’s later involvement at Cambridge in the Laudian restoration of the
Anglican church, in Marian devotion, and in Catholic-looking observances has
been readily perceived as a conscious denial of his father’s crusade against
the Church of Rome. According to E.I. Watkin, however, William Crashaw’s
passionate concern that Anglicanism should embody the purity of the primitive
and medieval church suggests that the poet’s feminine-sounding faith was rather
the completion and liberation of his father’s emotional religious views. When
his father died in 1626, Richard Crashaw, now entering his teens, became the
charge of the lawyers Sir Henry Yelverton and Sir Randolph Crew. Three years
later he was admitted to the distinguished Charterhouse School, where he
bloomed under the indulgent eye of its Royalist head, Robert Brook, who was
later expelled from this position around the time Crashaw fled from Cambridge
in 1643. At Charterhouse Crashaw perfected the rigorous discipline of the
classicist and epigrammatist. Every Sunday he was obliged to compose four Greek
and four Latin verses on the New Testament reading at the second lesson of
matins, a practice he continued on a Watt scholarship to Pembroke College,
Cambridge, from 1631 to 1634. He produced his first volume of poetry at
Cambridge in 1634, the Epigrammatum Sacrorum Liber, a collection of his
classical epigrams on the morning service which had so moved his stepmother.
These verses reveal new springs of tenderness as he became absorbed in a Laudian
theology of love, in the religious philanthropy practiced by his Pembroke
master, Benjamin Laney, and preached by his tutor, John Tournay, and in the
passionate poetic study of the Virgin Mother and Christ Child.
Crashaw’s
reputation as “the chaplaine of the virgin myld” (Car’s “Anagramme”) would be
cemented at Peterhouse where he was elected to a fellowship in 1635. In secular
verses from his undergraduate days such as “Wishes to his (supposed)
Mistresse,” however, he salutes the lady of his ardent imagination. The most
brilliant of these exercises, “Musicks Duell,” brings together his academic
interest in translating Jesuit Neo-Latin verse with an altogether more worldly
knowledge of Thomas Carew’s bold erotic masterpiece, “A Rapture.” It would be
wrong, then, to conclude from Car’s posthumous allusion to “his virgin
thoughtes and words” that Crashaw was indifferent to the force of sexuality.
But by the time he took holy orders and was appointed to the Peterhouse curacy
of Little St. Mary’s around 1638, he had chosen to live as he would die “in
th’virgines lappe”; and in this maternal framework his supreme development took
place. According to Allan Pritchard, even the Puritan informers who kept the
High Church rituals of Peterhouse under surveillance could sense the
spiritually charged atmosphere that pervaded the sanctuary as Crashaw “turned
himselfe to ye picture of the Virgin Mary ... and used these words ‘Hanc
adoramus, colamus hanc’” (We adore her, we worship her). Indeed, one of
Crashaw’s early English epigrams, translated from a Latin exercise
commemorating the Annunciation in 1632, is often depicted as a poetic
reproduction of the religious paintings in which the Virgin adores the child
seated on her lap. However, in this epigram, Mary is not richly adorned but
represented unassumingly, and more to the point of Crashaw’s title, “On the
Blessed Virgins bashfulnesse,” indirectly. No sentimental allusion to the
Virgin’s maiden shyness is being made in the title of his epigram which begins,
“That on her lap she casts her humble Eye,” and ends, “‘Twas once looke up,
’tis now looke downe to Heaven.” Mary’s face is hidden from the reader because
it is fixed on Christ, who is the true focus of the poem. In an understated way
Crashaw was refuting his detractors who accused him of idolizing the Virgin or
who regarded Marian veneration as an arrogation of the honor due to Christ
alone. Crashaw was also declaring his solidarity with Anthony Stafford’s
Laudian promotion of Mary in The Femall Glory, published in 1635:
Yet
would I not idolatrize thy worth,
Like
some, whose superstition sets thee forth,
In
costly ornaments, in cloathes so gay,
So
rich as never in the stable lay.
I
cannot thinke thy Virgin bashfulnesse
Would
weare the Lady of Lorettos dresse.
From
the explicit reference to Stafford’s citation of “Virgin bashfulnesse” in the
title of Crashaw’s own epigram, it may be concluded that he wrote this poem
soon after his arrival at Peterhouse; but the ceremonial ostentation of Laudian
practices there and the devotional excess of the Italian shrine of Our Lady of
Loreto, where Crashaw would die in 1649, have often obscured the important ways
in which the Virgin simplified his faith even as she inspired more
sophisticated expressions of his art. If Peterhouse was the “little contenfull
kingdom” (letter written at Leiden, Holland, February 20, 1644) in which he
polished his poetry and purified his prayer life from 1635 until 1643, “On the
Blessed Virgins bashfulnesse” is the “contentfull Cell” (“Description of a Religious
House”) epitomizing his later development. Like the proverbial mustard seed of
the Gospels, the epigram hides the great truth of the Incarnation within its
small, eight-line form: “’Tis Heav’n ’tis Heaven she sees, Heavens God there
lyes.” At the Annunciation it had been revealed to Mary that she would become
the mother of “Heavens God”; but as Crashaw contemplated what this feast meant
to him, first in Latin and then in English verse, he saw that at the heart of
the mystery of the Incarnation lay Christ’s promise that the kingdom of Heaven
is within everyone. It was the “least of your least,” as Crashaw realized when
he signed himself “Tuorum minimorum minimus” in the “Epistle Dedicatory” to the
Epigrammatum Sacrorum Liber, who would inherit this kingdom because they alone
were willing to minimize the self in importance. The difficulties that critics
have with Crashaw’s poetry and their almost invariable preference for Donne’s
religious sonnets, in which the human and divine ego are locked in a power struggle,
indicate how highly self-consciousness is prized among readers. Yet, to read
Crashaw’s epigram, we are obliged to quiet the designing mind that clamors to
be the center of attention. Foes who branded Crashaw “the chaplaine of the
virgine myld” saw him rapt in prayer before the icon of the Virgin in
Peterhouse College chapel. What this poem suggests, however, is that he learned
to pray by contemplating her reflection on Christ.
Mary
showed Crashaw his way forward in prayer and in poetry. Both are disciplines
demanding periods of silence, self-abandonment, and solitude; and they thus
require of the man or woman considerable courage, a courage observed in the
Virgin at the Annunciation, who was prepared to “go it alone” as a mother. As
Crashaw’s devotion to Mary grew at Peterhouse, so did his readiness to put
himself at risk politically as well as poetically. Indeed, Paul A. Parrish
shows how Crashaw’s life and art demonstrate a fidelity to feminine virtues
that are opposed to a masculine world of power, domination, and control. It
would be a mistake to see these as cloistered virtues, though they were, no
doubt, fostered by prolonged prayer “in the Temple of God.” From his nightly
vigils before the altar of Little St. Mary’s, Crashaw emerged like the medieval
knight who vowed to serve the weakest members of his society. In his final days
at Pembroke he had come out in support of his tutor, Tournay, who preached
against the Puritan emphasis of faith at the expense of love. In a concurring
Latin poem, “Fides quæ sola justificat,” Crashaw depicted “this Faith alone so
sadly, so desolately alone,” like an aging widow, devoid of family and friends
and bereft of their charity. When he first came to Peterhouse, the poet became
further embroiled in the theological controversy raging at Cambridge between
Puritans and Laudians when he wrote a preface in verse, “Upon the ensuing
Treatises,” for Robert Shelford’s Five Pious and Learned Discourses (1635) and
reiterated Saint Paul’s warning to the Corinthians: “though I have all faith,
so that I could remove mountains, and have not charity, I am nothing.” In this
remarkable poem Crashaw made it his radical “masculine theme” to create a
feminine environment in which religion was no longer the blunt instrument of
political power but the generous outpouring of the “tame and tender heart,”
“meek and humble eyes” like those of the bashful Virgin. His speaker reaches
out in love to the “poore,” the homeless, and, astonishingly, to the pope
himself: “In summe, no longer shall our people hope, / To be a true Protestant,
‘s but to hate the Pope.” In expressing his Christian love for all men, even
the archenemy of his father and most English Protestants, Crashaw began to feel
what it was like for Christ to be a stranger in his own land. Taking Shelford’s
words in his “First Discourse” to heart—“in God’s service we must neither see
father nor mother, brother nor sister ... nor our own selves neither”—Crashaw
would begin to let go of the past and become dispossessed like the Mother and Child.
The
“Hymn in the Holy Nativity,” which may have been drafted as early as 1637, was
the first of three Christmastide hymns that would eventually appear as a trio
in the Carmen Deo Nostro. In this first hymn Crashaw was inspired by the
Nativity Gospel of Luke to emulate the song of joy which the shepherds
improvised as they returned to their fields after beholding the Virgin and her
newborn son in the manger. It is interesting to note that the first version of
this hymn was placed almost immediately after “Psalme 23” in the 1646 Steps to
the Temple. It would thus appear that this Nativity hymn was positioned to
underline the poet’s own identification not only with the stray sheep but with
the “poor Shepheards, home-spun things: / Whose Wealth’s their flock; whose
witt, to be / Well read in their simplicity” (1652 version of “Hymn in the Holy
Nativity”). Moreover, as all eyes of the shepherds are on the infant Jesus
asleep at the warm breast of his Mother, we can once again see how Crashaw used
the Virgin and Child as an icon that focused his poetic attention and clarified
the meditative purpose of his art, which was prayerful absorption in God. In
his final version of the hymn published in Carmen Deo Nostro, the sensuous
stanza, in which Mary quiets her child with a mother’s tender breast and
lullaby, would be eliminated. For some the image of the woman openly
breastfeeding her child is either too sentimental or too unseemly. The only
image in Crashaw’s poetry which exceeds that of the Virgin exposing her breast
and offering it to her crying baby in its vulnerability is that of Christ
stretched on the Cross, his breast exposed to the centurion’s lance. Crashaw
was not afraid to show his “feminine” sensitivity to the most vulnerable
members of society. His poetic rituals of vulnerability are a declaration of
the opening of the heart to God that transpires in prayer. The lyrical stanza
in which the Virgin’s voice can be heard above that of the shepherds as “She
sings thy Teares asleepe, and dips / Her Kisses in thy weeping Eye” would be
cut from the 1652 version of the hymn. Given the poet’s passionate devotion to
the Virgin Mother, it cannot have been easy for him to sacrifice these lines
“And let the MIGHTY BABE alone. / The Phænix builds the Phænix’ nest. / LOVE’s
architecture is his own”; but no more authentic step could he have taken to
affirm the necessity of self-surrender:
To
thee meeke Majesty! soft KING
Of
simple GRACES and sweet LOVES.
Each
of us his lamb will bring
Each
his pair of sylver Doves;
Till
burnt at last in fire of Thy fair eyes,
Our
selves become our own best SACRIFICE.
In
this closing stanza the most powerful image of the hymn is fully released. It
is the image of the child as the new light source to replace the sun, a
mystical concept Crashaw would explore in all its terrible beauty in the
Epiphany hymn. For much of the Nativity hymn, however, the fearsome energy of
the child was hidden by the body of his mother, an adroit indication of how God
incarnated himself in the obscurity of human flesh. At the end of the hymn,
however, the shepherds no longer make the Old Testament sacrifice of burnt
offerings. Imitating the divine child, who will become both their Good Shepherd
and their Paschal Lamb, they are set alight with love as they gaze “in fire of
Thy fair eyes.”
What
Crashaw was trying to suggest about the direct encounter with God in prayer is
clarified by his august companion piece, “Hymn in the Glorious Epiphanie,”
which commemorates the Adoration of the Magi celebrated on January 6 as the
feast in which Christ was made manifest to the Gentiles. The poem begins where
the Nativity hymn left off, depicting the child mystically as the “Bright BABE!
Whose awfull beautyes” disinherit the sun; and it examines the adjustments in
perception that must be made if the world is to live and grow in the light of
Christ, the Lumen de Lumine. Like the shepherds and their sheep, the wise men
too “strangely went astray,” not through slowness or stupidity, but the
intellectual brilliance that is often at work in Metaphysical wit or
contemporary criticism. As the poet reviewed a long human history of mistaken
beliefs, clever conceits, specious theories—all personified by pagan sun
worship—he was aware that every age has its “Bright IDOL.” According to Pritchard,
when the Puritan investigators sought evidence in 1641 of popish image worship
in the Laudian church services of Peterhouse, Crashaw himself would be cited
for Mariolatry and for his superstitious practices of “diverse bowings,
cringeings” and incensing before the altar. In turn, Crashaw saw the Puritan’s
religious intolerance and dogmatic iconoclasm as forms of self-idolatry. Idols
reveal the susceptibility of all parties—Laudian, Puritan, Catholic,
Protestant—to make themselves and not their God the center of life. In the
final section of the Epiphany hymn the Crucifixion is represented as the
portentous moment when mankind will be freed of its idols. Yet the Three Kings
insist at the outset that the Christ child is the whole point of the
poem—“All-circling point. All centring sphear. / The world’s one, round,
Æternall year”—that Christ is mother as well as child: “O little all! in thy
embrace / The world lyes warm, and likes his place.” Only near the end of the
hymn does it become possible to introduce the concept of the via negativa
(negative path) conceived by Dionysius the Areopagite after he reportedly
witnessed the ominous eclipse of the sun when the Son of God died on the Cross.
The concept, that God can only be described in terms of what he is not, is only
conceivable if the centering activity integral to prayer occurs and life no
longer revolves around the sun or the self but Christ: “Thus shall that
reverend child of light, / By being scholler first of that new night, / Come
forth Great master of the mystick day.”
Given
the sensuous development of his poetic devotions, critics have wondered whether
the Epiphany hymn represents “some attempted and never consummated change in
the character of Crashaw’s religious life and his poetic method.” Indeed,
Austin Warren suspects that he was temperamentally unsuited to pursue any
further poetic experiment with the via negativa. Almost all of Crashaw’s
poetry, however, is some form of meditative exercise, the aim of which is to
guide the reader toward the light of vision turned wholly on God. Crashaw’s
poetry takes us to the brink, the moment to which all prayer leads, the moment
of apophatic wisdom when everything to do with the conscious self must be
abandoned—images, ideas, words—and fall away before God. His dilemma as a poet
was acute: he depended on artful language and thought and yet was striving to
capture the non-conceptual, self-disregarding state of pure contemplation.
Rather than burn his poetry, as other Renaissance poets did, Crashaw chose to
follow the ardent path of the shepherds leading to ecstatic self-sacrifice, or
the more taxing example of Mary which was unsung self-effacement. Neither
course has been looked at sympathetically by his modern critics. If they do not
read sexual sublimation or, worse, perversion into what William Butler Yeats
might have called “the uncontrollable mystery” of Crashaw’s work, they feel
that he concentrates an abnormal amount of his poetic energy on a woman who is
meek, mild, and mindless.
In
his own day the poet’s devout raptures were seen as the fruit of the intensive
prayer program devised by his master at Peterhouse, John Cosin, or practiced by
the spiritual community of Little Gidding. This was the first and only
religious house to be formed after the traumatic dissolution of the monasteries
during the Reformation. Little Gidding was founded in 1625 by Nicholas Ferrar,
close friend of George Herbert and the original editor of his Temple. The
devotional adherence at Little Gidding to older forms of piety such as round-the-clock
prayer vigils and to relics of the old religion such as crucifixes or madonnas
obviously attracted Crashaw, who was involved in similar practices and
adornments at Peterhouse. Both he and the Ferrar family would also attract the
unwelcome attention of the Puritans, who branded Little Gidding an “Armenian
nunnery” and leveled it to the ground in 1647. Crashaw’s intimate association
with the Ferrar community dates from at least 1636, when the nephew of Nicholas
Ferrar, Ferrar Collet, became his pupil at Peterhouse. It is possible, however,
that the poet was introduced to the family as a boy by his own father through
an early association with the Virginia Company. Indeed, his youthful poetic
exercise “Psalme 23” could have originated from the psalm readings which were
so important a feature of the daily worship at Little Gidding. If Richard
Crashaw was not acquainted with Little Gidding from the time of its inception,
he certainly showed a lifelong devotion to its members. After his flight abroad
to Leiden, in 1644, he was anxious to see his college fellowship transferred to
Ferrar Collet and to uphold the honor of Ferrar’s chaste sister, Mary Collet,
the “gratious mother” for whom he had strong feelings.
In
“Description of a Religious House,” first published in 1648 alongside Latin
tributes to Peterhouse, Crashaw extolled the monastic life practiced at Little
Gidding. This georgic poem of aching beauty enunciates his commitment to prayer
as life in which he is conscious of God’s presence in daily work—“Hands full of
harty labours; Paines that pay / And prize themselves; doe much, that more they
may”—and sees his redemption at work even in “the sweat of this daye’s
sorrows.” In the opening of this poem Crashaw emphatically disclaims “roofes of
gold,” “riotous tables shining,” “endlesse dining,” and “tyrian silk proud
pavements sweeping” as “tumultuous joyes” and “false showes of short and
slippery good.” For the soul who loves God more than the world, the quality of
life cannot be separated from the quiet practice of prayer:
Silence,
and sacred rest; peace, and pure joyes;
Kind
loves keep house, ly close, and make no noise,
And
room enough for Monarchs, while none swells
Beyond
the kingdomes of contentfull Cells.
In
the letter that he wrote while in exile, probably to the Ferrar family, Crashaw
would express his longing to return to the “little contenfull kingdom” of
Peterhouse, a longing which no doubt included the “contentfull Cells” of
neighboring Little Gidding. The longing for home is deeply imprinted in
Crashaw’s poetry and psychic makeup. He sought this home in an undifferentiated
community like Little Gidding open to men and women; welcoming Protestants and
Catholics; exhibiting “feminine” qualities, “soft” and “sweet,” and masculine
virtues, “hard” and “harty.” He saw this home in the heaven that the Virgin
made for her son in her womb, lap, and bosom. He ultimately finds it in the
closing line of his poem when “the self-remembering SOUL / ... / ... meditates
her immortall way / Home to the original source of LIGHT and intellectuall
Day.” Once again, Crashaw depicted his art as one of meditation, a repeated,
rapturous discovery that God has made his home and his heaven in the center of
every soul.
Crashaw’s
decade or so of piety at Cambridge, from 1631 until the end of 1642, was the
most idyllic period of his short life. He experienced not only the depth but
the height of Christ’s love, and Crashaw’s spiritual joy is evident in “O
Gloriosa Domina,” his paean to Mary as generatrix of goodness, not sin. With
the support of his college friend and fellow poet, Joseph Beaumont, whose
Laudian piety would also scandalize Puritans, Crashaw celebrated the “Glorious
Assumption” of the Virgin. Though the Assumption was not formally recognized in
the seventeenth century as an article of either Anglican or Roman faith, it
allowed Crashaw to pursue his spiritual conviction that Christ stirs within the
depths of our humanity and calls us to rise to his divine height. According to
David Lloyd’s Memoires (1668), Crashaw’s church services were thronged with
Christians eager for this message in sermons “that ravished more like Poems,
than both the Poet and Saint ... scattering not so much Sentences [as]
Extasies.” In fact, the appreciative editor of Crashaw’s Steps to the Temple,
who could well have been Beaumont, promised in the preface that the poet’s
verse would have much the same effect and “lift thee Reader, some yards above
the ground.” It was certainly Beaumont who in 1638 broadcast word of an
elevated woman whose name and works were unheard of in English—the mystical
Saint Teresa of Avila. Crashaw’s three poems in her honor—
“A
Hymn to the Name and Honour of the Admirable Saint Teresa,” “An Apologie for
the fore-going Hymne,” and “ The Flaming Heart”—are, arguably, his most sublime
works; they have earned him a new following among contemporary readers. These
three poems form a triptych to the woman saint, representing three stages of
faith: the institutional, critical, and mystical; three phases of human attachment:
child, adult, and parent; and three expressions of gender: feminine, masculine,
and androgynous. Just as Christians have difficulty in conceiving that there
are three persons in one God, so they cannot see how in faith and in love they
themselves approximate the Trinity. Indeed, the triune God is the prototype for
Teresa’s spiritual achievement, which is to embody all humanity in her “Flaming
Heart.”
The
full title of “A Hymn to Sainte Teresa” describes Teresa as “A WOMAN for
Angelicall heigth of speculation, for Masculine courage of performance, more
then a woman. WHO Yet a child, out ran maturity, and durst plott a Martyrdome.”
According to Parrish, Teresa remains throughout the poem the child-woman who
confounds all those of greater maturity. At the beginning of the hymn, she
plans the first of her great escapes at age six, running away from home to
bring Christian salvation to the Moors and win the martyr’s instantaneous
admission to heaven. Her role models are the Spanish conquistadores, such as
her own brother: “old Souldiers, Great and tall, / Ripe Men of Martyrdom” who
defend the doctrinal traditions and institutional history of the church
militant. Teresa’s spiritual growth involves unlearning their instruction to
her in childhood and listening with a mystical wisdom, which has nothing to do
with age, to the God who communicates directly to her from within:
SWEET,
not so fast! lo thy fair Spouse
Whom
thou seekst with so swift vowes,
Calls
thee back, and bidds thee come
T’embrace
a milder MARTYRDOM.
Stripped
of male heroics, the martyr is simply one who bears witness in life to Christ.
Socially prevented in childhood and by womanhood from the masculine conquest of
new worlds, Teresa is gently turned to the conquest that absorbed the poet, the
conquest of that mysterious world of the inner self. The latter half of the
hymn draws on Teresa’s own ecstatic account of her mystical transverberation
and on images throbbing with eroticism to write “Love’s noble history.” This is
not a history of subjugation or indoctrination but of surrender to Christ’s
enlargement of the heart and to a love which stretches from the “mild / And
milky soul of a soft child” to the milky way of heaven. In the second of his
Teresa poems, “An Apologie for the fore-going Hymne,” Crashaw turns from this
inner vision of Christ’s all-embracing love to question the social prejudices
that divide the Church on earth:
Forbid
it, mighty Love! let no fond Hate
Of
names and wordes, so farr præjudicate.
Souls
are not SPANIARDS too, one freindly floud
Of
BAPTISM blends them all into a blood.
Crashaw
makes no apology for the fact that as an Anglican poet he has taken a Spaniard,
a woman, and a Catholic for his subject—but only that neither this nor the
foregoing hymn can capture Teresa’s eloquence. He exhorts his fellow Christians
to make peace with one another, but both his poetry and Teresa’s writings on
prayer direct readers to find this peace, which comes from Christ, first within
themselves. At the end of the poem he elevates the Eucharistic chalice that he
was accustomed to handling as a celebrant at Little St. Mary’s. It is filled
with a communion wine strong in love, the only cordial for the stricken
17th-century heart. “The Flaming Heart,” which completes his Teresa trilogy,
alludes to a 1642 English translation of her life. Added to the Steps in 1648,
Crashaw’s poem is the most intricate of his tributes. The poet opens with the
commanding voice of church authority:
Readers,
be rul’d by me; and make
Here
a well-plac’t and wise mistake,
You
must transpose the picture quite,
And
spell it wrong to read it right [.]
His
initial dispute is with the painter who drew a crude and childish illustration
of the saint pierced through the heart by the dart of the seraphim. As a poet,
Crashaw upheld the traditional superiority of the word to the picture in
conveying such inner mysteries; but, as a painter himself, he was praised in
Car’s “Epigramme” (1652) for the “holy strife” between his pen and pencil as to
“Which might draw vertue better to the life.” Crashaw thus proposes to correct
the painter’s misconstruction with his own writer’s pen and, in particular, to
address the gender misconceptions that have led the artist to mock “with female
FROST love’s manly flame” by painting “Some weak, inferiour, woman saint.” In
the second section of the poem, which begins around line 69, he strives to
reproduce Teresa’s flaming heart. This heart personifies that which he must
bring about in his own “hard, cold, hart,” a spiritual transformation of self
described in Galatians as a transformation in which “there is neither male nor
female,” neither parent nor child, strong nor weak, active nor passive, “for ye
are all one in Christ Jesus.” In the magnificent entreaty that culminates the
poem, Crashaw invokes not only “all the eagle in thee, all the dove” but the
pious memory of his own parents. He also concedes that both the verbal and the
visual image fade away before Teresa’s indescribable communion with God: “By
all of HIM we have in THEE; / Leave nothing of my SELF in me.” Though, in
conclusion, he effaced himself and his art before the woman saint, he did not
wish to dwell on Teresa so much as on Christ, who dwelled in her heart.
Crashaw’s
remarkable Teresa trilogy is the product of an inclusive prayer life in which he
made God his center and saw God as the source of a more harmonious knowledge of
the self and of others. If these poems nudge readers to relearn and unlearn
many assumptions about the shape of the spiritual life, Crashaw himself was now
forced by the destruction of the Civil War to wean himself from the security
and the bliss he had found at Peterhouse. His movements after his disappearance
from Cambridge in early 1643 remain something of a mystery and suggest a life
in painful disarray. He may first have fled to nearby Little Gidding before
making his way to a friend in Lincolnshire, with whom he left a private
manuscript of his poems. He is next heard of in Leiden, when, on February 20,
1644, he writes his only surviving English letter, either to the Ferrar family
or Beaumont. Scandalized by the secularism of Dutch life, denied access to his
spiritual mother in exile, Mary Collet, by her uncles, Crashaw beseeches the
friends he has left behind: “what must I doe? what must I bee?” It is possible
that shortly thereafter Crashaw made his way back to England and found
temporary shelter at the Oxford court of Queen Henrietta Maria. Those who would
aid him in his final distress were present here with the queen—Abraham Cowley,
another Cambridge friend and poet, and Susan Feilding, Countess of Denbigh and
First Lady of the Bedchamber. The queen and her entourage fled to Paris in July
1644, and Crashaw went to ground, perhaps on the run in England, perhaps adrift
on the Continent. Eventually surfacing in Paris sometime in 1645, Crashaw
confided in Thomas Car, the experienced confessor to English refugees. The
poet’s vagrant existence made a lasting impression on Car, as shown by “The
Anagramme”:
He
seeks no downes, no sheetes, his bed’s still made.
If
he can find a chaire or stoole, he’s layd,
When
day peepes in, he quitts his restlesse rest.
And
still, poore soule, before he’s up he’s dres’t.
For
much of his life Crashaw was content to prosper as the birds of the air or the
lilies of the field “and seek not ye what ye shall eat, or what ye shall drink,
neither be ye of doubtful mind” (Luke). On the Continent he still sought the
kingdom of heaven but simply could not have survived without the material
intervention of his new friends, especially when his old ones spoke of him in
the “Preface to the Reader” as “this Learned young Gentleman (now dead to us).”
The countess of Denbigh used her influence to persuade the queen in early
September 1646 to recommend Crashaw to the pope. The poet expressed the ardent
gratitude of the Roman convert by entrusting his poems to Car for a new
Catholic volume of his verse, Carmen Deo Nostro, and by ensuring that this
volume, which was published posthumously in 1652, would be dedicated to the
countess “in acknowledgment of her Goodnes & Charity” and in hopes of her
own imminent conversion. Yet there was a malicious report published in a volume
titled Legenda lignea (1652) that Crashaw had attached himself to “deluded,
vain-glorious Ladies, and their friends.” In his poems of devotional instruction
such as “Letter to the Countess of Denbigh” or “Ode on a Prayer-book,” he did
not hide the sense of failure as well as success, of frustration as well as
sweetness, that dogs the spiritual life. These poems are flawed as human nature
itself is flawed. The nervous, excited imagery in “Letter to the Countess of
Denbigh” of a “Heav’n-beseiged Heart” that “Stands Trembling at the Gate of
Blisse” but “dares not venture” inside is an honest reflection of the struggle
both for discipline and for release in prayer. Crashaw’s controversial epigram
“Blessed be the paps which Thou hast sucked” is addressed not to Mary but to
weaker handmaidens of the Lord. In meditating on scripture, these women pray
that Christ may be incarnated in their hearts but discover a deep unwillingness
to respond wholly to his word, a phenomenon further demonstrated by the strong
critical resistance to this poem. Even in Crashaw’s other notorious poem, “The
Weeper,” imagery is used lavishly to surfeit and to shut down the mind. The repetition
that mars this work as poetry functions as a mantric device to release the
prayer that, with Mary Magdalene’s tears, wells up to heaven from the heart.
Bolstered
by the great hopes that the English Catholic community abroad had of him,
Crashaw made his way as a pilgrim to Rome in November 1646. For the next year
he struggled with poverty and ill health, and while waiting for some papal
retainer, is reputed by Sir Robert Southwell to have complained that “if the
Roman church be not founded upon a rock, it is at least founded upon something
which is as hard as a rock.” After renewed diplomatic entreaties to the pope in
1647, Crashaw secured a post with the virtuous Cardinal Palotto who was closely
associated with the English College. Finally, in April 1649, the cardinal
procured him a cathedral benefice at the Virgin’s socalled Holy House and
Shrine, the Santa Casa at Loreto. Weakened by his precarious existence in
exile, Crashaw set out for Loreto in May and died there of a fever on August
21, 1649. This “poore soule” was only 36. No one conversant with the last
wretched stage of Crashaw’s life can see his poetry as insulated from
suffering. As he drew near to the fabled house in Loreto, which was reputed to
be where Mary was born and where she received the Annunciation, Crashaw must
have thought he was on the home stretch. In a manner of speaking he was; but
like Mary in “Sancta Maria Dolorum” he would first have to endure the pain of
the Cross and look death in the face:
Before
her eyes
Her’s,
and the whole world’s joyes,
Hanging
all torn she sees; and in his woes
And
Paines, her Pangs and throes.
Each
wound of His, from every Part,
All,
more at home in her owne heart.
In
this unique reworking of the Latin hymn “Stabat Mater,” he studies the mother
heartsick with grief before her crucified son: “His Nailes write swords in her,
which soon her heart / Payes back, with more then their own smart.” Just as
Saint Teresa’s heart was pierced by the seraphim’s dart, so here Mary is
transfixed by a Metaphysical sword of sorrow that corresponds to Christ’s pain,
especially to the deathblow he received from the centurion’s spear. As an
Anglican cleric at Little St. Mary’s, he had often contemplated a picture of
the Virgin Mother. According to Paul Cardile in an essay published in Cristiana
(1984), such paintings were often hung over altar tables and depicted Mary’s
priestly role at the Crucifixion, Presentation in the Temple, or Nativity.
Little Gidding was noted for its mater dolorosas. In his tribute to the mother
of sorrows, the poet now asked Mary to teach him the meaning of sacrifice,
which lay at the heart of his own priesthood:
By
all those stings
Of
love, sweet bitter things,
Which
these torn hands transcrib’d on thy true heart
O
teach mine too the art
To
study him so, till we mix
Wounds;
and become one crucifix.
In
her maternal compassion Mary showed Crashaw what Christ suffered because he
took mankind’s own suffering to heart. Crashaw spoke as an Anglican priest, and
he was never ordained in the Roman Church. He died a mere “beneficiatus”
responsible only for singing the office in the basilica and having no active
share in the great offering he had depicted. His lesser part corresponded to
that of the angels who often attended Mary in paintings depicting her priestly
mediation. They were sometimes dressed in the vestments of minor orders that
Crashaw would have worn and been buried in at Loreto. His worldly friend,
Abraham Cowley, described how fitting such a death was for a poet who spoke
with the tongues of men and of angels:
How
well (blest Swan) did Fate contrive thy death;
And
made thee render up they tuneful breath
In
thy great Mistress Arms; thou most divine
And
richest Off’ering of Loretto’s Shrine!
Where
like some holy Sacrifice t’expire,
A
Fever burns thee, and Love lights the Fire.
Angels
(they say) brought the fam’ed Chappel there,
Tis
surer much they brought thee there, and They,
And
Thou, their charge, went singing all the way.
In “Psalme 23” Crashaw had expressed the juvenescent hope that his end would be his beginning “And thence my ripe soule will I breath / Warme into the Armes of Death.” “Hope,” Cowley had asserted in a poetic debate with Crashaw at Cambridge, “is the most hopelesse thing of all.” Cowley might well have felt his point was proved when according to Wood’s Athenæ Oxonienses (1691, 1692), he found his friend in Paris “a meer Scholar and very shiftless.” Yet from childhood Crashaw had treasured hopes of heaven, not of earthly reward. In death he was honored by Cowley for his poetic intimation of a deeper and higher wisdom to life, which eluded the subjects of a more knowing world.
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