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

‘Looke Downe to Heaven’ 207
better when they were further edited for Carmen Deo Nostro. 7
This chapter will fall
somewhere in the third camp. It will largely focus on the poems found in Steps to the
Temple, especially those considered to have been written in ‘bad taste’, but it will not try
to redeem them through considering mediaeval or Roman Catholic devotional practices,
nor will the chapter argue for a maturing taking place between the publication of the Steps
to the Temple and Carmen Deo Nostro; rather I will argue that the value of the poems
comes from the fact that they make the reader uncomfortable. This anxiety felt by the
readers should be experienced, and the anxiety is used to help contemplate the physical
Lord before leading the reader on to a contemplation of the heavens and God’s reign in
them. Ultimately, the anxiety brought by the reading of Crashaw’s verse has two
trajectories. There is the anxiety experienced by the reader who is uncomfortable with
being forced to meditate on the concept of having to actually consume the body of Christ.
Often, this is not an idealised or metaphorised body of Jesus, instead the reader is asked to
suck or kiss the very real and very dead body of Jesus hanging on the cross. Then there is
the anxiety of the poet who is fearful of an inability to truly commune with and experience
the Incarnation in the flesh because of the distance of space and time that separates all
those who come after the Passion from the physical Christ. Yet, as one critic argues, for
Crashaw, the Incarnation ‘was the central fact in the world’s history, not that Christ had
died for man to satisfy God’s justice and redeem his elect, but that God should have come
into the world, stooping his glory to the meanness of earth, adding to his ancient cares the
littleness of human life’, 8 and through ‘stooping’ God provides a way to experience the
divine in natural terms, though Crashaw does not treat the Incarnation with ‘a rare
tenderness, and an exquisite delicacy’, 9 rather he allows the beauty of the birth of God and
7 For example see Kerby Neill, ‘Structure and Symbol in Crashaw’s Hymn in the Nativity’, PMLA 63.1
(1948), 101-13.
8 Helen C. White, The Metaphysical Poets (New York, 1956), p. 233.
9 Constance Spender, ‘Richard Crashaw, 1613-1648’, Contemporary Review, 116 (1919), 212.