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

‘Looke Downe to Heaven’ 228
The Eucharistic imagery of the poem is seen in the very first line. This feast of bread,
unlike the communion meal to be shared by believers after the resurrection, is whole. The
host has not been violated yet. Here the reader also gets the first mention of ‘Teeth’ that
becomes so important in the next epigram about the feeding of the multitudes, and this
epigram ends in the playful line asking what more we would want, because Crashaw has
provided us with the image of Jesus eating bread. Here is a miraculous meal of bread that
Jesus gives, and partakes in, as a way to feed his followers. Here the reader sees Christ
partaking in a sort of communion meal, but with the seemingly rhetorical question of
‘What would ye more?’ there is the reminder that, in fact, more is needed. This feast must
know a ‘wound’ before it is complete, and so although the image of ‘food it selfe is fed’ is
indeed incomplete, but it does still meet a need of faith. In this first epigram on the
feeding of the multitudes, a physical God provides physical sustenance for his followers,
and at the same times proves his own physical existence through eating. These are both
important incarnational themes that Crashaw presents his readers, but in the second
epigram, ‘On the Miracle of Loaves’, the issue of faith for believers and their need for a
physical reality to support that faith is the main point.
The epigram ‘On the Miracle of Loaves’ is merely two lines long, but the emphasis
upon the mundane aspect of chewing is made to be one of the proofs of Jesus’ divinity.
Now Lord, or never, they’l beleeve on thee,
Thou to their Teeth hast prov’d thy Deity.
Proof of deity has come down to the teeth. This miracle of providing food for his
followers is presented by Crashaw as one of the greatest proofs of the God-in-man that