Bright soft things

Who is the quintessential Catholic poet in English? It is a more difficult question than it might appear at first glance. There have been many very good ones of course, but because Catholics have been a marginalized minority in Anglophone countries (with the exception of Ireland) since the 16th century, there are few central figures to choose from. To be sure, Geoffrey Chaucer and Alexander Pope were Catholic, but were their works especially so? Some of you would no doubt bestow the laurel upon Gerard Manley Hopkins, who is indeed a formidable candidate. Some of you might wistfully point to John Donne as the one who got away. Some of you might buy what T.S. Eliot is selling. Others of you might say, with a dash of bravado, that the quintessential Catholic poet in English has yet to emerge. My vote, however, would go to that strangest and most singular of the metaphysical poets, that fanciful, enigmatic outsider, that sole poetic exemplar of the Anglo-Baroque, Richard Crashaw.

When Crashaw’s poetic merit is acknowledged, it tends to be with a certain amount of sheepishness and ambivalence. He is so remarkably un-English, so thoroughly possessed by unalloyed joy and the extravagance and exuberance of the Council of Trent. Moreover, he tends to strike many later readers as flying dangerously close to the limits of good taste, if not crossing over them entirely. In legendary critic Mario Praz’s study of Crashaw, The Flaming Heart, the Italian wrote:

Crashaw, better than any of the poets who were his contemporaries, achieves a result which may be said to have been the common aspiration of baroque art: that inextricable complexity of presentation, that one universal Art in which all the arts should blend and become an indistinguishable whole…. [He] create[s] in verse an effect similar to that of many a famous baroque building, and to illustrate the fundamental baroque tendency to avoid a closed composition, to develop single parts irrespective of the ensemble, to emphasize the picturesque and spectacular to the detriment of design and balance. Crashaw lets himself be waylaid by all the attractive images which ogle him at every turning, ventures into dangerous ascents which lead nowhere, gets lost in intricate mazes of conceits, and thus achieves a dazzling effect which may remind us of the impressionist technique…. he is [incapable] of a concise style, of rendering severe and manly feelings in a few strokes; on the contrary, he makes capital out of whatever lends itself to florid divagations and to description of tender and delicate emotions. Grace is not denied to him, but Strength is beyond his reach.

Praz’s mixed response here is typical, yet his tone is more admiring than we might initially suspect. Throughout his essay, he repeatedly demonstrates the ways in which Crashaw’s genius takes from yet improves upon that of Giambattista Marino, the founder and foremost representative of Baroque poetry on the Continent, and we are left with the rather startling implication that we English-speakers, despite ourselves, possess one of the greatest Baroque poets in history– a man whom we are usually content to relegate to the second tier of the Metaphysicals.

By the way, because I’m sure that some of you are wondering, I would distinguish the Metaphysical procedure from the contemporaneous Baroque procedure by saying that while both share an interest in conceits, wordplay, and the fusion of sensuality and devotion, the Metaphysical poets are more focused on the wit derived from fashioning an argument around a single conceit, whereas the Baroque poets are more focused on the wit derived from sheer invention, dazzling the reader with a kaleidoscopic barrage of conceits, sensuous images, and florid diction.

On this note, I suspect that our lukewarm rating of Crashaw, like our similarly lukewarm rating of Swinburne, has less to do with him than ourselves– what we look for in poetry is not what he was looking for. Within his sphere, and by the Baroque standards he set for himself, he was exceptionally successful. We therefore undervalue him not only because we do not possess the Baroque sensibilities to appreciate him fully, but because we do not consider the opportunity he presents us to expand our sensibilities. If his effeminate luxuriance, blissfully untroubled faith, and perfervid emotion cause us to cringe, let us remind ourselves that we cringe not because he has failed, but because he has probably succeeded in a way that makes us uncomfortable.

What is undeniable is that Crashaw’s Baroque maximalism allowed him to access verbal and emotional vistas unavailable to nearly any other poet in the English language, and that these delirious regions are eminently suited to the mystical states he is nearly always trying to describe and evoke. Come to think of it, I would wager that Crashaw is not only the closest English analogue to the Baroque poets of Italy and Spain, but to the Sufi poets of Persia. His signature mode of rapturous awe, attempting to describe the indescribable, is exceedingly rare in the canon of English poetry, but actually quite common in many other languages, and this is yet another reason why he deserves our closer attention.

An examination of Crashaw’s brief but dramatic life confirms the seriousness of his Catholic convictions. Born in 1613 to a famous Puritan thinker, William Crashaw, who often preached against Catholicism, young Richard began writing poetry in his teenage years at the Charterhouse School, where he was taught to compose epigrams in Greek and Latin on Biblical subjects. Epigrams were deeply in vogue at the time, a fad prompted by the excitement of rediscovering the epigrams of the Greek Anthology, and epigrammatic rhetoric had quickly made its way into the sermons and devotional writings of Catholics and Protestants alike. Crashaw’s training in this environment is crucial to understanding not only his own proclivity for the epigram, but the nature of his larger poems as well, which often feel as if they are comprised of a series of semi-autonomous epigrammatic paradoxes in succession– a string of barocco pearls.

Crashaw then went on to Cambridge, where he was exposed to the High Anglicanism of the Archbishop of Canterbury William Laud, who was inspired by the Counter-Reformation to move the Anglican Church in a far more Catholic direction. In 1636, Crashaw became ordained as a priest and began to serve as a curate at Little Saint Mary’s in Cambridge, where he began to fervently preach his new Laudian Christianity and deck the church with relics and crucifixes. In 1643, Cromwell’s Puritan revolution forced Crashaw to resign his post, and he elected to flee the country. The following year, holed up in the Netherlands, in despair at the state of English Christianity, Crashaw finally converted to Catholicism. After two more years of horrible destitution in France, Crashaw made his way to Rome, where, after much persistence and a recommendation from the exiled English queen, Henrietta Maria, he finally obtained an audience with Pope Innocent X, who granted him a humble position serving one Cardinal Palotta. Crashaw’s final move came in 1649, when he was installed at the Basilica della Santa Casa in Loreto. However, exhausted by years of poverty and in poor health, Crashaw died soon afterwards, at the age of 36.

Little Saint Mary

Anyone who reads Crashaw for any length of time will be struck by his tender and ardent devotion to Mary and the female saints, and his uncommon fascination with the nurturing, feminine side of the divine; a tendency for which he has historically suffered much criticism, but which we may now be in a better position to appreciate. He is undoubtedly most famous for his trilogy of poems on the life and mysticism of Saint Teresa of Avila, culminating in his masterpiece, “The Flaming Heart.” Today however, I would like to focus on a shorter poem of his which is nevertheless highly representative. It is called “The Tear,” and concerns the popular Baroque subject of the penitent, weeping Magdalene. It goes like this:

The Tear

What bright soft thing is this?
Sweet Mary, the fair eyes’ expense?
A moist spark it is,
A wat’ry diamond; from whence
The very term, I think, was found
The water of a diamond.

O ’tis not a tear,
’Tis a star about to drop
From thine eye its sphere;
The sun will stoop and take it up.
Proud will his sister be to wear
This thine eyes’ jewel in her ear.

O ’tis a tear
Too true a tear; for no sad eyne,
How sad so e’re,
Rain so true a teare as thine;
Each drop leaving a place so dear,
Weeps for itself, is its own tear.

Such a pearl as this is,
(Slipped from Aurora’s dewy breast)
The rose bud’s sweet lip kisses;
And such the rose itself, when vexed
With ungentle flames, does shed,
Sweating in too warm a bed.

Such the maiden gem,
By the wanton spring put on,
Peeps from her parent stem,
And blushes on the manly sun:
This wat’ry blossom of thy eyne,
Ripe, will make the richer wine.

Faire drop, why quak’st thou so?
’Cause thou straight must lay thy head
In the dust? o no;
The dust shall never be thy bed:
A pillow for thee will I bring,
Stuffed with down of angels’ wing.

Thus carried up on high,
(For to Heaven thou must go)
Sweetly shalt thou lie
And in soft slumbers bathe thy woe;
Till the singing orbs awake thee,
And one of their bright chorus make thee.

There thy self shalt be
An eye, but not a weeping one,
Yet I doubt of thee,
Whether th’hadst rather there have shone
An eye of Heaven; or still shine here,
In th’Heaven of Mary’s eye, a tear.

We have here eight six-line stanzas or sestets, all of which are more or less in the same shape. These stanzas are polymetric; they run: trimeter, tetrameter, trimeter, tetrameter, tetrameter, tetrameter. The exception is stanza three, which substitutes the trimeter lines for dimeter lines. Why does Crashaw do this? I have no idea. We have now identified the quantity of these meters, but what about their quality? It’s a bit of a tricky question. While we cannot say that the poem is merely accentual– Crashaw does stick to a firm pattern of alternating weak and strong stresses– it would be a bit of a distortion to call it purely iambic. After all, look at all these acephalous lines! What Crashaw seems to be doing is composing a poem with an iambic rhythm, yet treating many of the pauses at the ends of his lines, especially those which have commas, as phantom beats, much as we might see in the meter of a folk ballad. As an example of Crashaw’s rhythmic flexibility, let us scan the penultimate stanza:

Thus CArried UP on HIGH = iambic trimeter
FOR to HEAven THOU must GO = acephalous iambic tetrameter
SWEETly SHALT thou LIE = acephalous iambic trimeter
and IN soft SLUMbers BATHE thy WOE = iambic tetrameter
TILL the SINGing ORBS aWAKE thee = trochaic tetrameter, OR, acephalous feminine iambic tetrameter
and ONE of THEIR bright CHORus MAKE thee = feminine iambic tetrameter

In order for this rhythm to flow iambically, we have to take a small rest after the ends of lines one, two, and four. Even so, there remains the sense that we are shifting back and forth between iambic and trochaic rhythms. The inclusion of a headless feminine iambic line, line five, which is a true line of trochaic tetrameter, only further emphasizes the trochaic effect.

We must also be careful that we do not trip over Crashaw’s Caroline pronunciation. For instance, in the first stanza, in order for the meter to work, we must pronounce the word “moist” with two syllables, “moi-est,” and the word “diamond” with three: “di-a-mond.” Obviously, these considerations of old school pronunciation apply when we are looking at rhymes as well.

Speaking of which, we find that each stanza exhibits the rhyme scheme ABABCC. While Crashaw often allows phrases to spill over from the quatrain to the couplet, the concluding couplet ensures that each stanza ends neatly and remains self-contained. Some of you may recognize that this is the scheme of the famous Venus and Adonis stanza, and while this scheme was employed by many poets, it is possible that it was already at this point mainly associated with Shakespeare’s famous poem. If you will indulge me in a smidge of speculation, I believe that it is possible that Crashaw chose this scheme because he saw a parallel between Venus grieving for her Adonis and the Magdalene– so often associated, like Venus, with eroticism– grieving for her crucified lord.

In the first stanza alone, we immediately get a sense of Crashaw’s sensibility– his evocation of softness and sweetness shows his shameless appreciation for feminine tenderness, and separates him from his sterner metaphysical compatriots. The description of Mary’s tear as a “moist spark” strikes us as visually credible, but it is a quiet paradox– a fusion of water and fire. So too, the “watery diamond,” is a fusion of water and earth. Mary’s tears, Crashaw suggests, contain all the cosmic elements, and are beyond any of them. Crashaw’s etymological speculation that Mary’s “watery diamonds” gave rise to the phrase “the water of a diamond,” may strike us as clunky, but its implications are quite lovely. In the diamond industry, every diamond is said to have its own “water,” its own way of sparkling with light. Crashaw is therefore not only saying that Mary’s tear resembles a diamond, but that it resembles the sparkle of light itself which is within the diamond, which helps to clarify the “moist spark” image. He is also implying that within every actual diamond are the tears of Mary, a marvelous fusion of the theological and geological, and an exquisitely Catholic symbol of the beauty to be gained from suffering.

In the second stanza, things already take a turn for the explicitly cosmic. The tear is now a shooting star, falling from the planet of Mary’s eye. Then, by a sudden leap of planetary association, the tear becomes a drop of dew being transpirated by the sun. Crashaw’s remark about the sun’s sister wearing the tear as an earring– a “tearring” we might say– might initially confuse us; what, we might ask, does the moon have to do with dew or the water cycle? But then we recall that, in Greek mythology, Helios has another sister– Aurora, the goddess of the dawn. We realize that this is the sister being referred to: the twilight goddess who wears tears of dew like diamonds in her radiant hair. Even within a vision as thoroughly Christian as Crashaw’s, there is still a place for classical ways of thinking, which is also very Catholic.

The third stanza supplies us with the most famous line in the poem. As with the last stanza, Crashaw begins with a fresh new riff on Mary’s tear, and you can now see what I mean when I say that Crashaw’s longer poems can often seem like collections of epigrams strung together. He now turns his attention to the purity of her tear, which stems not only from the purity of Mary’s grief, but from the fact that the tear itself is aggrieved to leave her face– it “weeps for itself, is its own tear.” This fabulously reflexive conceit does not entirely originate with Crashaw, as a version of it can be found in Sir Philip Sidney’s Arcadia, where the water where princesses are bathing “seemed to weep, that it should part from such bodies.” Andrew Marvell, of course, would use Crashaw’s formulation for his own brilliant neoplatonist poem of divine longing, “On A Drop of Dew,” which, if you have not read, you simply must– it makes a fascinating spiritual contrast to “The Tear.”

In the fourth stanza, the tear becomes a pearl decorating Aurora’s breast, and is thus simultaneously a marine jewel on the breast of a woman, a drop of dew in the morning, and the Magdalene’s tear all at once– metaphors within metaphors. From here, the imagery only gets more sensual: this pearly dew of a tear is one that the “rose bud’s sweet lip kisses,” and Crashaw then points out that the rose itself sheds dew when the sun shines upon it. Of course, this is only what is happening on the literal level. The lines read:

And such the rose itself, when vexed
With ungentle flames, does shed,
Sweating in too warm a bed.

Contra Gertrude Stein, this rose is not just a rose– it is Mary herself, weeping as she beholds the fierce light of God’s presence. It is, perhaps, the divine rose of the Godhead that Dante beheld in Paradiso. It is the sweating rose of Jesus’s wound upon the cross, dripping from the heat of his passion, a figure that Crashaw would have had in mind from reading Marino’s poem, “The Sweat of Blood.” The line “sweating in too warm a bed,” while ostensibly referring to a flowerbed, naturally reminds us of lovemaking, and Crashaw was never one to shy away from comparing physical to spiritual ecstasy. Mary, who at this time was often seen as a figure of wanton lust who had been redeemed, now ardently desires nothing but the body of Christ, and the passion of her grief and repentance is blended with the passion of her desire. Sweating in a bed may also put us in mind of someone with a fever, and the mood of this poem is nothing if not febrile.

In the fifth stanza, we return to the rose (which is also a gem, because why wouldn’t it be?) and observe how at its maturity it turns red– blushes– upon facing the sun. So too does Mary blush upon seeing the face of the Son of God, in her case out of both shame and desire. We then return to the tear, which is itself now a “blossom,” and Crashaw says that when it is ripe, it will make a “richer wine.” This is of course an allusion to the miracle of turning water into wine, and here, the transubstantiation of the tears of penitent grief into the sacrament of the blood of Christ.

In the sixth stanza, Crashaw observes that the tear trembles on the edge of Mary’s lash, as if in fear of falling. He reassures it, however, that “dust shall not be thy bed.” In other words, death is not the end. “Dust thou art, and to dust thou shalt return” is but one chapter in the story of the soul. Rather, the penitent, righteous soul shall fall unharmed into the lap of God, with angel wings for their pillow. It is tempting to complain that such an image is entirely too precious, but we must remember that with Crashaw, God’s sublimity lies in an excess of care more than anything else. It is His mercy and hospitality that are most overwhelming.

After evaporating into the sky, the tear-soul fully processes its sorrow and joins the angelic host, where it surreally becomes its own eye to witness the beatific vision. Crashaw could have ended here, but instead, dares a far more shocking conclusion. He doubts, he says, whether the tear would rather be “an eye of heaven,” than have remained “in the heaven of Mary’s eye, a tear.” This is astonishing, for it amounts to saying that the earthly realm of the human Mary is equal to or possibly even superior to the realm of heaven itself. There is probably a sense in which this could be taken heretically, but what I think Crashaw is after is a radical attempt to have us understand the holiness of the incarnation, the holiness of physical creation. Just as Christ is fully God and fully Man, so are we called to fully appreciate the divinity of both the natural and supernatural worlds, and not fall prey to the gnostic fallacy, as Marvell does in his poem, of lionizing the transcendent at the expense of the immanent. Despite his vertiginous, mind-bending play of conceits and his high-flown mystical raptures, Crashaw ultimately calls us not just to the heavens, but to the things of this world. To my understanding, there are few things more Catholic than that.