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

‘Looke Downe to Heaven’ 219
fact, in the next stanza this image is expanded as we are told that ‘Every morne’ (25) a
‘briske Cherub something sips’ (26) from the river, and that the drink of milk for breakfast
sates him through the day. The use of the imagery of liquid, milk, the Milky Way, and
breasts cannot help but bring erotic imagery to mind. Robert Herrick even has an epigram
that is erotic and uses the same imagery. Herrick’s ‘Upon Julia’s breasts’ (H-230) reads:
DIsplay thy breasts, my Julia, there let me
Behold that circummortall purity:
Betweene whose glories, there my lips Ile lay,
Ravisht, in that faire Via Lactea. 34
The breasts and their association with the heavenly stars clearly had an erotic connection,
so with Magdalene’s tears becoming heavenly milk in the ‘bosome’ of heaven, we see the
poet trying to also move our minds from the fallness of the sinful prostitute to a redeemed
woman whose eyes weep tears that become mother’s milk, and transcend the body of ‘The
Weeper’. Her eyes and breasts have been transformed. Her sight and her works are made
holy as they rise from the earth in which they have been trapped, and from here, we leave
terra firma, not to return to a true earth until the end of the poem.
It is the final three stanzas that create a conversation between the tears and a
character that may be the author or reader. The discussion begins with
Say watry Brothers
Yee simpering sons of those faire eyes,
Your fertile Mothers.
34 J. Max Patrick (ed.). The Complete Poetry of Robert Herrick (New York, 1963).