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

‘Looke Downe to Heaven’ 239
than God’s naked suffering. The horror shocks the poet, but he quickly recovers and turns
the shame on its head.
Th’ have left thee naked Lord, O that they had’;
This Garment too I would they had deny’d.
Thee with thy selfe they have too richly clad,
Opening the purple wardrobe of thy side.
O never could bee found Garments too good
For thee to weare, but these, of thine own blood.
The Lord is not naked, because he is clothed in his own blood. The shame of hanging
dead and naked for all to see is transformed into the realisation that he could not be more
beautifully clothed, because he is completely covered in his own blood. His wardrobe is
the hole in his side created when he was stabbed to ensure that he was indeed dead. He is
clothed in death, but paradoxically he is also clothed in his life-giving blood. His spilled
blood marks his death, but it is also his life that has flowed out and given life to all. After
his dead body draped in blood hangs in this poem, it is moved in the next poem to the
tomb, and the tomb then becomes a throne.
‘Easter day’ breaks up the meditation on the bleeding Jesus as it is a poem that
does not directly mention Jesus, instead it looks at his tomb. The tomb is transformed
from the cold stone to flesh. It becomes a ‘Virgin Tombe’ (2) and ‘Natures new wombe’.
(5) It is the new mother of Jesus. Just as his life had to come from a virgin woman, so to
does his rebirth come from virgin earth. And here Crashaw plays with the ‘death dying’
trope also seen in Donne’s ‘Holy Sonnet XIV: Death be not proud’, but here death is seen
as defeated, and in the defeat, victor.