Jesse Sharpe PhD thesis - Research@StAndrews:FullText ...

‘Looke Downe to Heaven’ 205
VI
‘LOOKE DOWNE TO HEAVEN’: EXPERIENCING THE
INCARNATION IN RICHARD CRASHAW’S POETRY
Richard Crashaw is a devotional poet who often inspires more discomfort than
appreciation. Although he is often discussed in terms of his mystical and otherworldly
imagery, he still spends much of his time dwelling on the pre-resurrected Jesus. And it is
this emphasis on the body of Jesus, either before the Passion or hanging on the cross,
which creates much of the poetry that he is reviled for writing. This devotional poetry
creates an unease in the reader and critic that is unsettling because of how it presents Jesus,
and yet I believe that this unease, this anxiety, originates from Crashaw. I do not see him
as a naïve, otherworldly mystic who was often unsuccessful in portraying his visions to his
readers. I do not believe that the discomfort that arises from reading his verses should be
seen as a failure on his part; rather, that it is how we must respond to his verse. While it
seems that many of his modern critics are uncomfortable with the images Crashaw gives
us to meditate on, I believe that these images are signs of the discomfort Crashaw
experienced in his attempts to ensure a communion with the Incarnation. He is not a poet
who joins with doubting Thomas asking to put his fingers in the resurrected Christ’s hands
and his hands in the resurrected Christ’s side; 1 instead he wants to put his mouth to the
body of Jesus hanging dead on the cross, bruised, bloody, and naked. John Donne’s
anxiety over the continuation of the flesh after the resurrection led him to attempt to use
language that compared salvation to God penetrating him, whereas Crashaw’s anxiety
1 John 20.27, William Aldis Wright (ed.), The Authorized Version of the English Bible, 1611, 5 vols.,
(Cambridge, 1909), all quotations from the Bible are from this edition.