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

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‘Looke Downe to Heaven’ 220<br />

What hath our world that can entice<br />

You to be borne? what is’t can borrow<br />

You from her eyes swolne wombes of sorrow. (121-6)<br />

The enquiry begins with a desire to find out why these tears, which have been described in<br />

such lavish and even gaudy terms, have their being. However, we aren’t given an answer.<br />

As the next stanza shows, the questioning of the tears continues with no place for response.<br />

Whither away so fast?<br />

O whither? for the sluttish Earth<br />

Your sweetnesse cannot tast<br />

Nor does the dust deserve your Birth.<br />

Whither hast ye then? o say<br />

Why yee trip so fast away? (127-132)<br />

The questions mount quickly, and we see mentions of the real earth again. It is a ‘sluttish<br />

Earth’. While the idealised eyes can be pure and yet ‘swolne wombes’, the earth, the very<br />

real ‘dust’, is dirty and promiscuous. This could be a reminder of who is crying the tears,<br />

but it is most certainly an argumentative stance that is taken in regards to the heavenly<br />

realms in which this devotion seems to be taking place, a world of neo-platonic existence<br />

that would be tainted by true flesh, and the actual biblical event of a prostitute crying over<br />

a holy man’s feet, and then using her hair to wash the dirt off of him. 35<br />

And in the final<br />

stanza, we get the tears’ response to the questions, and the response does not point back to<br />

35 Luke 7.37-8.

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