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

‘Looke Downe to Heaven’ 243
He cries out to Mary to teach him how to become one with Jesus. He wants the same
access to the physical Christ that she once had. And when he is able to ‘mix / Wounds’
and ‘suck the wine’, he too will be able to ‘become one crucifix’ with Jesus. He will
experience him on the cross. He will become ‘A lost Thing to the world, as it is to [him]’.
He will move, by way of the senses, through the physical Jesus and into the Divine other
world.
In ‘Sancta Maria Dolorum’, we see that it is indeed through gaining access to the
Incarnation as it was on earth that we can know God, and that it is through the times when
his physical fluids can interact with ours, through blood, saliva, or tears, that we can
become one with him. In her discussion of ‘The Weeper’, Lorraine Roberts most helpfully
sums up this phenomenon. Of the poem she states:
The up-and-down movement throughout the poem establishes a congress between
heaven and earth, and that movement is paradoxically reflected in the last lines.
Are these the feet of Christ on earth, at the moment of Crucifixion? Or are these
the feet of the risen Christ, who has ascended to heaven and is followed by the
Queen of Sorrow? Of course they are both, uniting time and space in a manner
dear to the heart of all baroque artists, and no less so to Crashaw. 56
Crashaw, the poet, tries with his words to give the reader this experience, and Crashaw the
believer calls on one who knew Jesus in the most intimate of ways, his mother, to do the
same for him.
56 ‘The “Truewit” of Crashaw’s Poetry’, p. 181.