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

‘Looke Downe to Heaven’ 240
Death onely by this Dayes just Doome is forc’t to Dye;
Nor is Death forc’t; for may hee ly
Thron’d in thy Grave;
Death will on this condition be content to Dy. (15-18)
Death is seen as a wonderful thing, because through Christ’s death, it was defeated, but in
being defeated it was able to participate in the giving of life to all. This short divergence
in the five poem sequence does much to remind the reader that while we must look at and
physically experience the naked, bloody Lord on the cross, there will be a transformation
through his death. Only through the physical Jesus can the Divine be experienced. In
Jesus’ resurrection the world can be transformed into Eden. The earth can be a virgin, and
Death can be personified and celebrated. God cannot be approached through the mystical,
but he can lead to it through his suffering. The following poem is yet another poem on
Jesus bleeding, and it acts as a reminder that although we can celebrate ‘Easter day’ we
cannot move past the crucifixion yet. We must meet Christ there, and so, once more, we
must meditate ‘On the bleeding wounds of our crucified Lord’.
‘On the bleeding wounds’, as has become expected of Crashaw’s verses on Jesus,
is gory. This truly is an amazing meditation about how Jesus’s blood is able to save the
world through covering sin, but instead of a figurative and poetic covering this is a literal
covering. The world was destroyed through the deluge of water, but it is redeemed
through a deluge of blood. The first stanza sums up the poem when it states
Jesu, no more, it is full tide
From thy hands and from thy feet,