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

‘Looke Downe to Heaven’ 235
God the Father being told by Jesus to ‘Tast this’ (3) blood spilt from his penis. There is a
very combative tone in Jesus’ words as he talks to the Father, and Helen White has even
said that ‘The audacity with which these lines treat the wrath of God would be
blasphemous if represented as uttered by any but divine lips’. 53
He says to God, ‘Tast this,
and as thou lik’st this lesser flood | Expect a Sea, my heart shall make it good’. (3-4) This
is clearly not a request, but a demand, and three lines later, the directions that Jesus gives
to God become oddly impersonal, they feel angrier, and he states, ‘Then let him drinke,
and drinke, and doe his worst, | To drowne the wantonnesse of his wild thirst’. (7-8) Here
Crashaw is not just making Mary or Magdalene experience the physicality of the
Incarnation, but the first member of the Trinity is also being forced to partake of the blood.
Furthermore, the Father is shown as having a ‘wild thirst’. It is ‘wanton’. And there is a
rebelliousness, an affront to the Father in the line ‘let him drinke, and drinke, and doe his
worst’. In this poem, Crashaw is not allowing any aspect of the sacrificial Incarnation be a
pleasant concept to dwell on. There is a need with Crashaw to force the basest aspects of
Jesus’ existence upon the Father and upon his readers. He must force the reader to move
through space and time in order that they too can see Jesus as he was. Crashaw works
through exuberance, or extravagance, or grotesqueness to create images portraying what is
an unsettling theology, that of the Incarnate God brutally suffering and dying, and through
this a reader cannot help but focus on the God made flesh. No one is free, not Mary, not
the Trinity, and not believers coming centuries after the fact, from having to face the
horrors of what it meant for Jesus to die. Perhaps through making those who walked with
Christ face the terrifying concept of a bloody Lord, Crashaw and his readers may also be
able to participate. Crashaw’s identity in Christ does not come from meditation on things
that are higher, but on a broken and bloody Lord that must be tasted, chewed, and drunk.
53 The Metaphysical Poets, p. 232.