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

‘Looke Downe to Heaven’ 229
exists in the incarnate Jesus. It is not one of the miracles that one would first think of as a
proof of divinity, but to Crashaw it is key. There are the clear indications of a real
presence in the bread, and then the fact that those gathered to Jesus are able to ‘sink their
teeth’ into his proof of divinity is of utmost importance to understanding why it is through
simple substances, bread and wine, that believers can access the Incarnation. Also,
because of the biting and tearing of the bread in their mouths, those gathered are wounding
the ‘Feast’, and these epigrams then seem to contradict Ryan Netzley when he states that
Crashaw has created a ‘communion that revolves around taste, but avoids all of the messy
physical objections – mastication, partition, division . . .’, 42 but it is always in ‘messy
physical objections’ that Crashaw works, so while it may be problematic from a Thomist
perspective to masticate the deity (as Netzley argues) this is what Crashaw is found to do,
in that he specifically points to eating and the teeth as proof of the incarnational workings
of God. This feast then foreshadows the communion feast, and reminds the reader that
they are the ones who are responsible for wounding the ‘Feast’, and that, even more
importantly, God has both provided the meal, and partaken in it. God both provides Jesus
through the birth of the Incarnation, and then participates in the wounding by allowing his
crucifixion. The bread has been provided, but the wine and blood are to come.
If ‘The Weeper’ is often complained of by critics, then the epigram ‘Luke 11.
Blessed be the paps which Thou hast sucked’ is reviled, 43 and although Eugene R. Cunnar
has tried to lessen the impact of the shocking content in this poem (as well as in other
verses by Crashaw that involve the consumption of Christ’s fluid expressions) by pointing
to medieval devotional works that also involve such imagery, 44 it is the very fact that such
devotional works are bizarre that helps to move believers past complacency and forces
42 Ryan Netzley, ‘Oral Devotion’, Texas Studies in Literature and Language 44.3 (2002), 257.
43 An excellent example of this is found in ‘Taste and Bad Taste’, pp. 68-9.
44 Eugene R. Cunnar, ‘Opening the Religious Lyric’, in John R. Roberts (ed.), New Perspectives on the
Seventeenth-Century English Religious Lyric (London: University of Missouri Press, 1994), pp. 237-267.