CHAPTER SIX

DIVINE INFATUATION

CRASHAW AND M!RÄ~ BÄ!

The spiritual ardour of the Counter-Reformation and the literary influence of the Italian Baroque, which merged in the writings of Robert Southwell, are more marked in the poetry of Richard Crashaw. Both poets were as much influenced by the Christian meditative tradition, which gave rise to the M.E. devotional lyrics, as they were by the themes and techniques of Tansillo and Marino. It has been shown how Southwell combined the warm humanity of the M. E. lyrics with theological concern in his treatment of the Nativity. The same thing may be observed in Crashaw's A Hymne of the. Nativity, Sung by the Shepherds (1646), in which the focus is the Virgin and her "fair-ey'd Boy" worshipped by the shepherds. There is present in this earlier version of 1646 the medieval concreteness of the compositio Joci with a reference to the conventional lullaby and motherly solicitude and tenderness:

The Babe no sooner 'gan to seeke, Where to lay his lovely head, But streight his eyes advis'd his Cheeke, 'Twixt Mothers Brests to goe to bed. Sweet choise

Shee sings thy Teares asleepe, and dips Her Kisses in thy weeping Eye, Shee spreads the red leaves of thy Lips, That in their Buds yet blushing lye. 1

But the last four lines quoted above are omitted in the 1648 edition and the poem has been revised with the aim of expressing the theological fact of the Virgin birth, as a divine mystery and paradox, in words which do not appear in the earlier version:

I Richard Crashaw, The Poems EngJish Latin and Greek 01 Richard Crashaw, ed. L. C. Martin

The Phaenix builds the Phaenix' nest. Love's architecture is his own. The BABE whose birth embraues this morn, Made his own bed e're he was born.2

Although modified or permeated by aspiritual dialectic the sensuous is indispensable to Crashaw's passionate approach to the Divine; and nowhere in English poetry is the lover-beloved mood, akin to the mädhurya-bhäva of bhakti, so clearly expressed as in Crashaw. The physical and spiritual beauty of Jesus and the Blessed Virgin; the warmth of their love and tenderness; and the sacred associations of the gospel narrative, legendary and historical episodes and characters - all these form the subject of his poems which have the surging emotions that are also characteristic of MTrärp Bäls poetic effusions in K!"~l).a bhakti verse. The affinity between her poetry and Crashaw's is no less remarkable than the similarity in their lives as devotees of the Supreme Lover, the "Absolute sole Lord" of St. Teresa whom also MTrärp Ba. resembles in her raptures and trances. Through all his chequered career as a Laudian in the face of protestant criticism, his associations with the religious community at Little Gidding, his suffering at the vandalism of the Cromwellian attack on Cambridge and his exile from it, his hardships after he became a Roman Catholic, and his final brief but peaceful period at Santa Casa in Loreto, Crashaw's was a life dedicated to God. Though he may not have taken a vow of celibacy, he had expressed his desire to live a single life, and did in fact never marry.

I would be married, but I'de have no Wife, I would be married to a single Life. 3

His joyous surrender to the love of God was made in a sensuous atmosphere rich in symbols and rites of ceremonial worship. Not for hirn the puritan austerity that would discard the sumptuous accoutrements of devotion:

Rise then, immortall maid! Religion rise! Put on thy seife in thine own looks: t' our eyes Be what thy beauties, not our blots, have made thee,

2 Ibid., p. 249. 3 Ibid., p. ·183.