THE SHORT OXFORD HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE

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flows from his side it is mystically perceived as sacramental wine: ‘Love is that liquour sweet and most divine, |
Which my God feels as bloud; but I, as wine’. Bitterness is transubstantiated into sweetness. ‘Love’ takes the form of
a colloquy in which the Lord, personified as Love, welcomes the sinner to his feast, insistently answering each protest
of unworthiness with a gentle assertion of his grace:
And know you not, sayes Love, who bore the blame?
My deare, then I will serve.
You must sit downe, sayes Love, and taste my meat:
So I did sit and eat.
The uneasy guest and the would-be servant are entertained as equals.
Throughout The Temple the quakings of fear, the doubts, and the attempts at rebellion are subsumed in a quiet
loyalty inspired by the love of a generous God. Restlessness, as seen in the deftly argued parable of free will, ‘The
Pulley’, prompts the soul to seek heavenly comfort. In ‘Affliction III’ the very utterance of the heaved sigh ‘O God!’
is interpreted as a barely recognized sign of redemption and as an admission of shared sorrow (‘Thy life on earth was
grief, and thou art still | Constant unto it’). Even the figure of Death, in the poem of that name, loses its skeletal
terrors by being transformed by the sacrifice of Christ into something ‘fair and full of grace, | Much in request, much
sought for as a good’. Herbert’s ‘Prayer before Sermon’, appended to A Priest to the Temple, addresses a God who
embodies ‘patience, and pity, and sweetness, and love’, one who has exalted his mercy above all things and who has
made salvation, not punishment, his glory.
According to Izaac Walton’s account, the dying Herbert entrusted the manuscript of his poems to his pious friend
Nicholas Ferrar (1592-1637) who in 1625 had retired to his estate at Little Gidding in Huntingdonshire to establish a
‘Little Colledge’, or religious community of men and women, dedicated to the ‘constant and methodical service of
God’. Ferrar was instructed that he would find in The Temple ‘a picture of the many Conflicts that have past betwixt
God and my Soul’ and he was allowed to choose whether to publish or burn the manuscript. As his short preface of
1633 indicates, he clearly recognized both the quality of the poems and their significance to the increasingly
beleaguered discipline of the Church of England. Although his community impressed Charles I, it steadily provoked
the hostility of those Puritans who criticized it as an ‘Arminian Nunnery’ and who in 1646 finally succeeded in
breaking it up.
Richard Crashaw (1613-49) was, through his friendship with Ferrar, a regular visitor to and keeper of vigils at
Little Gidding. He was the son of a particularly zealous Puritan ‘Preacher of Gods worde’ who had made himself
conspicuous as an anti-Papist. Crashaw’s own religious pilgrimage was to take him in an opposite direction to his
father. As a student at Cambridge and later as a fellow of Peterhouse he closely associated himself with the extreme
Laudian party in the University. Deprived of his fellowship after the college
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chapel, to which he had contributed fittings, was desecrated by Parliamentary Commissioners in 1643 he travelled
abroad, eked out a precarious existence on the fringes of Queen Henrietta Maria’s court in exile, became a convert to
Roman Catholicism, and ended his short life as the holder of a small benefice at the Holy House at Loreto in Italy. His
English poetry - collected as Steps to the Temple: Sacred Poems, with other Delights of the Muses (1646, considerably
expanded 1648) and later as Carmen Deo Nostro (published in Paris in 1652) - clearly shows the nature of his
religious inclinations, both Anglican and Roman. The Preface to his earlier volumes proclaims his allegiance to the
English Church through reference to Lancelot Andrewes and through the claim that the poems were written as
‘Stepps for happy soules to climbe heaven by’ under a ‘roofe of Angels’ at Little St Mary’s Church in Cambridge; the
1652 volume more assiduously advertises the Catholic piety which had been only implicit before, and offers an
apology, probably not Crashaw’s own, for the ‘Hymn to Saint Teresa’ as ‘having been writt when the author was yet
among the protestants’. The frontispiece to the 1648 volume showed the faithful mounting steps to a chastely
decorous English church; the 1652 edition is decorated throughout with lushly Catholic devotional images.
Although the title Steps to the Temple nods back to Herbert, and though the volume contains a particularly
fulsome tribute to ‘the Temple of Sacred Poems, sent to a Gentlewoman’, Crashaw’s stylistic and structural debt to his
model is limited. Crashaw is the most decoratively baroque of the English seventeenth-century poets, both in the
extravagance of his subject-matter and in his choice of metaphor. Where Donne is ingenious and paradoxical, or
Herbert delicately and aptly novel, Crashaw propels traditional Christian images until they soar and explode like skyrockets
or inflates them until they burst like plump confections. His verse exhibits a fixation with the human body and
with bodily fluids: tears gush from eyes, milk from breasts, blood from wounds, and at times the emissions become