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

‘Looke Downe to Heaven’ 232
that she cannot truly comprehend what would be happening. Her ‘hunger feeles not what
he eates’, and yet, when Jesus feeds, he will feed all. The final couplet in this poem
inverts what motherly sacrifice and feeding is about. The male Jesus will have a ‘Teat’ for
suckling, and at it his mother will find nourishment. This ‘bloody one’ that will arrive
‘e’re long’ for the woman, and all of Christ’s followers, is a ghastly, yet theologically
sound and profound, reminder of just what comes with the belief in a religion that requires
God to become incarnate in the flesh, and then to die for them. Further, he dies for
humanity, and from him, humanity must find their life. Crashaw is playing with an
amazing amount of concepts in these two lines of verse. First, he graphically portrays
Christ providing sustenance for his followers. He then shows Mother Mary as indebted to,
and inferior to, her son, because she must ultimately be ‘Tabled at [his] Teates’. He is
even using the concept of the Galenic view of the body in which mother’s milk was
believed to be a form of blood. 50
Mary may have provided the infant Jesus with life
through her transformed blood as he sucked at her breasts, but Jesus provides her with a
transformed life through having her suck undiluted blood from his body. He offers life
eternal through an unmediated access to his life blood as it flows from teats that have been
violently created on his body. And finally, the baseness of the language, the ‘paps’ and
‘Teates’ and ‘suck’, force the reader to confront the reality of the beliefs underpinning both
salvation and a transubstantiated communion meal with Jesus. While it is very tempting to
read a criticism of both Mary and transubstantiation in these verses due to the poems direct
and harsh language, I do not believe that this is what Crashaw intends us to do. I believe
that these unsettling lines are also calls to celebration. Only one woman could be so
blessed as to nurse the Incarnation, but all can, and must, suck the bloody body of the
crucified and risen Lord. Mary was truly blessed to have Jesus at her breast, as we see
50 Michael C. Schoenfeldt, Bodies and Selves in Early Modern England (Cambridge, 1999), p. 26.