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

‘Looke Downe to Heaven’ 225
But this stanza is then followed with the next beginning ‘O ’tis a Teare’. (13) He pulls
himself back from the earlier extravagances, but then can’t help himself, and must move
what he now acknowledges to indeed be a tear to be more than merely a tear. It may be a
physical tear, but it will be the greatest tear ever shed.
Too true a Teare; for no sad eyne,
How sad so e’re
Raine so true a Teare as thine’. (14-16)
The poet is still trying to force the tear to be more than a tear, and he desires that this act of
devotion is not just about crying to and on God; rather, he wants it to be a mystical act that
moves beyond its mere physical reality and so the tear is made into a ‘Pearle’ (19) ‘Slipt
from Aurora’s dewy Brest’; (20) it then becomes a ‘Rose’, (21) and then is described as a
‘watry Blossome’. (29) Yet the poet must return to the issue of dust, from dust you have
come and to dust you must return, but ‘The Dust shall never bee thy Bed’, (34) and so ‘A
pillow’ the poet will bring, ‘Stuft with Downe of Angels wing’. (35-6) The poet has all
but lost the lesson the tears tried to tell him in the ‘The Weeper’. The last two stanzas see
him try to completely abandon any pretence of reality, but then he relents. He doubts
himself, and the tear is returned:
Thus carried up on high,
(For to Heaven thou must goe)
Sweetly shalt thou lye,
And in soft slumbers bath thy woe;
Till the singing Orbes awake thee,