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

‘Looke Downe to Heaven’ 226
And one of their bright Chorus make thee.
There thy selfe shalt bee
An eye, but not a weeping one,
Yet I doubt of thee,
Whither th’hadst rather there have shone
An eye of Heaven; or still shine here
In th’Heaven of Mary’s eye, a Teare. (37-48)
The tear returns to Mary’s (a real person) eye. He acknowledges that this is where the tear
wants to be, and where the tear truly belongs, and so he must return it to its physical
setting. With this we see the struggle between the poet’s desire to remove Mary
Magdalene’s tears from her physical person, and his admission that this is where they
belong. For the act of devotion to be complete, a prostitute must cry tears that fall on the
feet of a man who is God incarnate. The devotion, if it is true devotion to Christ, must
meet with him in his physical being, and this is one of Crashaw’s great dilemmas, but as
has been said of weeping in his poems, ‘these poems do not look toward heaven for release
from grief – but to an earth filled with manifestations of God’s presence’. 41
How can he
partake in the physical presence of Christ?
It is interesting that these two poems of tears are followed by an epigram on the
baptism of Jesus. The poem ‘On the water of our Lords Baptisme’ is a simple four-line
epigram that feels refreshing after the two long meditations on crying. And in this simple
poem, Crashaw shows why the two poems on the tears fail and what he must do in order to
move from the physical to the Divine. The poem reads:
41 Telling Tears in the English Renaissance, p. 227.