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

‘Looke Downe to Heaven’ 214
of bodily fluids, whether tears, mother’s milk, blood, or saliva, and as Austin Warren
points out, the fluids ‘are constantly mixing in ways paradoxical and miraculous’. 20
It
must also be noted that the constancy of the imagery of fluids can seem bizarre or
excessive, as Mario Praz states, ‘Metaphors drawn from blood, wine, . . . recur in him with
an insistence which seems extraordinary even in a Catholic, accustomed to meditate on the
eucharistic mystery’; 21 however, as ‘extraordinary’ as the use of such images may be, they
are central to Crashaw’s imagery, as George Walton Williams has shown. 22
As he states:
The symbolic liquids themselves reflect two other symbolic concepts in the poetry.
They are susceptible to quantity and to color. The liquids have meaning in tiny
drops and in great quantities: in springs, fountains, rills, rivers, torrents, floods,
seas, oceans; in dew rain, showers, deluge. 23
The ability of liquid to be individual drops and floods allows Crashaw to move from the
small to the large and back again with a single conceit; also, the ability of fluid to be clear,
white, or red means that water, blood, and milk can baptise, purify, and feed. It is
symbolism that fits perfectly with his devotional practice of moving from earth to heaven
and back, from flesh to divine, and encompassing all the sacraments in one image, and
when it comes to the Incarnation, we see that what is inside must come out and be taken in
by another for communion to exist, and perhaps through visualising the bodies of those
who physically knew Jesus, those of us who are physically removed from Jesus can
partake as well. For, as Gerard Meath says,
20 Austin Warren, Richard Crashaw (University, LA, 1939), p. 188.
21 Mario Praz,The Flaming Heart (Garden City, NY, 1958), p. 254.
22 George Walton Williams, Image and Symbol in the Sacred Poetry of Richard Crashaw (Columbia, SC,
1963), pp. 84-104.
23 Image and Symbol, p. 84.