The Complete Works of Richard Crashaw, Volume IICrashaw, Richard
General
The Complete Works of Richard Crashaw, Volume II
Crashaw, Richard
English poetry -- Early modern, 1500-1700
I have much the same conception of Crashaw's thinking. It was so
emotional as almost always to tremble into feeling. Bare intellect,
'pure' (= naked) thought, you rarely come on in his Poems. The thought
issues forth from (in old-fashioned phrase) the heart, and its subtlety
is something unearthly even to awfulness. Let the reader give hours to
the study of the composition entitled 'In the glorious Epiphanie of ovr
Lord God, a Hymn svng as by the three Kings,' and 'In the holy Nativity
of ovr Lord God.' Their depth combined with elevation, their grandeur
softening into loveliness, their power with pathos, their awe bursting
into rapture, their graciousness and lyrical music, their variety and
yet unity, will grow in their study. As always, there is a solid
substratum of original thought in them; and the thinking, as so often in
Crashaw, is surcharged with emotion. If the thought may be likened to
fire, the praise, the rapture, the yearning may be likened to flame
leaping up from it. Granted that, as in fire and flame, there are
coruscations and jets of smoke, yet is the smoke that 'smoak' of which
Chudleigh in his Elegy for Donne sings:
'Incense of love's and fancie's _holy smoak_;'
or, rather, that 'smoke' which filled the House to the vision of Isaiah
(vi. 4). The hymn 'To the admirable Sainte Teresa,' and the 'Apologie'
for it, and related 'Flaming Heart,' and 'In the glorious Assvmption of
our Blessed Lady,' are of the same type. Take this from the 'Flaming
Heart' (vol. i. p. 155):
'Leaue her ... the flaming heart:
Leaue her that, and thou shalt leaue her
Not one loose shaft, but Loue's whole quiver.
_For in Loue's feild was neuer found
A nobler weapon than a wovnd._
Loue's passiues are his actiu'st part,
The wounded is the wounding heart.
. . . . .
Liue here, great heart; and loue and dy and kill,
And bleed and wound; and yeild and conquer still.'
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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