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

‘Looke Downe to Heaven’ 223
Kuchar is correct here, but he stops short. The power of rhetoric has been used to try to
move the poem beyond the page and into the life of the reader, but it is more than just an
example of the Eucharist. A believer can attend church and participate in the communion
meal, so there is no need for a poem to try to present to the reader what a priest can do
during weekly services; instead this poem allows the reader to participate in something that
is not contained in the Eucharist, it allows the reader to participate in the act of a
penitential lover of Christ spilling tears upon his feet. The feet of Jesus, dirty from
walking, literally the lowest point of his body, are the worthy object discussed in this
poem. With this simple and powerful final couplet (in either version of the poem), the
reader is forced back to the ‘sluttish’, or ‘sordid’, 38 ‘Earth’ and the ‘dust’ to experience
where God can really be found, where heaven actually exists – there on the ground. They
are not the night sky, or the Milky Way, or breakfast for the cherubim. They are not
sorrow personified, or pretty adornments for perfect, pastoral flowers. They are the result
of a bereft woman crying. And they fall. As Marjorie E. Lange says, ‘Nowhere is the core
of Crashaw’s vision more clearly expressed than in the simple recognition that the wonder
of Mary Magdalene’s EYES, praised through stanza after stanza is dwarfed by the arrival
at the lord’s FEET’. 39
What is interesting to note is that the very next poem in Steps to the Temple
involves Crashaw using the same conceit. In Steps to the Temple, ‘The Teare’ reads like
an attempt to write ‘The Weeper’ again, and yet stanzas from ‘The Teare’ are incorporated
into the version of ‘The Weeper’ that appears in Carmen Deo Nostro, and this fact has led
some to argue that ‘The Teare’ represents an earlier version of, or unused material from,
‘The Weeper’. 40
When reading the poem, one notices that here again the stanzas are
comprised of six lines each and follow the same rhyme scheme of a,b,a,b,c,c. But this
38 As the term is changed in the version found in Carmen Deo Nostro.
39 Marjory E. King, Telling Tears in the English Renaissance (New York, 1996), p. 244.
40 L. C. Martin’s ‘Page 83’ note to the poem, p. 434.