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

‘Looke Downe to Heaven’ 241
From thy head, and from thy side,
All thy Purple Rivers meet.
And it is from this conceit, the Lord bleeding rivers of blood, that the rest of the poem
flows. The wounds are effusive, as is the imagery, until it becomes an ocean, and this
ocean is a deluge.
This thy Bloods deluge (a dire chance
Deare Lord to thee) to us is found
A deluge of deliverance,
A deluge least we should be drown’d. (37-40)
It is a deluge of life, and as the waters recede, the reader finds that ‘Nere was’t thou in a
sence so sadly true, | The well of living Waters, Lord, till now’. (41-2) With this ending
then, the reader is brought back to drinking. If Jesus gives the ‘living water’ that makes
one thirst no more, 55 and the living waters are his blood that has saved the world through a
deluge, then when we drink of the waters of life, we drink in his blood, and take part in his
death and conquering of death.
Crashaw in these poems is desperately trying to bring his readers into contact with
the saving blood of Christ, and he has done so through depictions of people interacting
with Jesus when he was physically on earth. However, Crashaw himself has not been able
to join in with the acts of devotion. He, like his readers, is an outsider. In Carmen Deo
Nostro we see that he too strives to be there with Jesus and experience his physical
presence. In his poem ‘Sancta Maria Dolorum’, he pleads to Mother Mary to be a conduit
55 John 4.10.