Abstract
At the end of ‘The First Anniversarie’, Donne concluded that if Mary’s features were already fading from living memory, he had, at least, pieced together fragments of the worship she once inspired in one, final song:
From her example,’ and her vertue, if you In reverence to her, doe thinke it due, That no one should her prayses thus reherse, As matter fit for Chronicle, not verse, Vouchsafe to call to minde, that God did make A last, and lastingst peece, a song. He spake To Moses to deliver unto all, That song: because hee knew they would let fall The Law, the Prophets, and the History, But keepe the song still in their memory. (ll. 457–66, p. 285)
Successive editions of the Anniversaries were accessible to Crashaw from the year of his birth, while a more comprehensive volume of Donne’s poems was published at a critical moment in 1633 when he was an impressionable undergraduate and budding poet at Pembroke.1
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Notes
See the history of publication in Shawcross (ed.), The Complete Poetry, pp. 420, 478–80; Bald, A Life, pp. 538–42, and Lewalski, Donne’s Anniversaries, p. 307. Second, third and fourth editions of his poetry appeared at other significant junctures in 1635, 1639 and 1649.
See Martin’s account in The Poems of Crashaw, pp. xxv, xxix.
Recounted in Phillips, Reformation of Images, pp. 185–6. Clare College, Cambridge, where Nicholas Ferrar had found spiritual peace, lost 1000 ‘superstitious’ pictures. In 1560, John Jewel had also complained: ‘in the mean time, our universities, and more especially Oxford, are most sadly deserted; without learning, without lectures, without any regard to religion’ . See his letter to Peter Martyr, 22 May 1560, Caraman (ed.), The Other Face, p. 24.
Incidentally noted by Warren, Richard Crashaw, p. 47, along with the understandable if futile rage of the ordinary townspeople who had to live in the aftermath of devastation.
See Young’s discussion of this love song and ‘The Weeper’ as its sacred parody in Richard Crashaw and the Spanish Golden Age, p. 39.
See Stewart, The Enclosed Garden, especially chapter 2. Sandra Fischer discusses St Teresa of Avila’s devotional use of garden images in ‘Crashaw, Ste. Teresa, and the Icon of Mystical Ravishment’, Journal of Evolutionary Psychology (JEP) (1983) pp. 185–6. In Chapter 11 of her Life, Teresa speaks of the soul as a good gardener. See The Life of Saint Teresa of Avila by Herself, J. M. Cohen (trans.) (Middlesex: Penguin, 1957) pp. 78–80.
Stafford, The Femall Glory, p. 210, asserts that the Assumption ‘is held for an undoubted truth … by many of the Fathers, all of the Romish Church, and some of the Reformed’, a view verified by H. S. Box, ‘The Assumption’, in E. L. Mascall and H. S. Box (eds), The Blessed Virgin Mary, pp. 89–102, and Warner, Alone of All Her Sex, pp. 95–6.
See Freer in Cooper (ed.), Essays on Richard Crashaw, p. 83; Klemans, England’s Baroque Poet, pp. 110–14; and Young, Crashaw and the Spanish Golden Age, p. 46.
See Dennis Quinn’s discussion of ‘Donne’s Anniversaries as Celebration’ in Essential Articles, pp. 370–71.
Willard has shown how the Anniversaries reflect Donne’s interest in Paracelsian medicine which was significantly homeopathic in ‘Donne’s Anatomy Lesson’, pp. 35–51. It is thus particularly noteworthy that, as Warner writes in Alone of All Her Sex, p. 100, ‘ingredients of the herbalist’s art were laid on the altar, to be incensed and blessed’ on Assumption day.
I disagree, however, with the conclusion of Cooper, Essay on the Art of Richard Crashaw, p. 16, that: ‘Crashaw’s art denies freedom of mind in order to perpetuate faith’. Freedom of mind is the gift that the God of Christianity gives to man with his Son; and Crashaw joyously, extravagantly, even foolishly, exalts in this gift throughout his poetry.
Alvarez, The School of Donne, p. 97, was one of the first to insist that Crashaw was a critically acute editor of his own work. Paul Stanwood echoes his views in ‘Time and Liturgy’, p. 101. As far back as 1948, this was the assumption of Neill’s article on the Nativity Hymn. More recently, Davis has suggested the rationale behind the various changes the poet either made or authorised to the 1648 and 1652 editions of his poetry in ‘The Meditative Hymnody’.
Walter Davis repeats the Jesuit poet Strada’s definition of the religious writer as ‘medius inter Deum et homines’, ‘The meditative Hymnody’, p. 107.
Cunnar has this to say in Cooper (ed.), Essays on Richard Crashaw, p. 118: ‘Just as Christian martyrs sacrificed their lives to God, so Crashaw, the Christian poet, sacrifices his art, his life, for his faith while facing the wrath of the Puritans’.
Stephen Manning, ‘The Meaning of “The Weeper”’, ELH, vol. XXII (1955) pp. 34–47, made a determined effort to unfold the treasured thoughts of this poem but suggests, instead, what a tedious work it is to read and interpret.
See Praz’s The Flaming Heart, pp. 221–2, 218, respectively.
Low, Love’s Architecture, p. 137, points out that ‘“The Weeper”, sometimes characterized as an effort to whip up emotions artificially, even frigidly, may rather be an attempt to order strong emotions already felt by means of art’s cathartic rituals. “The Weeper” works least successfully with readers who come to it cold. Like Shelley’s greatest lyrics it addresses chiefly those who supply their own emotions before they begin the first lines.’
See the references to the Milky Way which suggest it was also Mary’s Way in Williams, Image and Symbol, p. 44, n. 64, and Milhaupt, The Latin Epigrams, p. 65.
See 1. 46 of this elegy in Abraham Cowley: Poetry and Prose, L. C. Martin (ed.) (Oxford: Clarendon, 1949) pp. 21–3.
See McLaren, ‘Marital fertility and lactation’, in Prior (ed.), Women in English Society, pp. 27–9.
See especially John Peter, ‘Crashaw and “The Weeper”’, Scrutiny, vol. XIX (1953) pp. 259–61, 266.
Discussed by Davis, ‘The Meditative Hymnody’, pp. 112–24, and Cunnar in Cooper (ed.), Essays on Richard Crashaw, pp. 105–9.
I am indebted to Docherty, Donne, Undone, pp. 135, 180 for bringing this pun to my attention.
As suggested by Queen Henrietta Maria’s letter to the pope of 7 September 1646. See Martin, The Poems of Crashaw, pp. xxxii–xxxiii.
Williams (ed.), The Complete Poetry, p. 660, provides the timely reminder that while ‘it is commonly assumed that those poems which appear in the volumes of 1646, 1648, and 1652 in different versions show a continuing succession of revisions’, it may be ‘that there are two parallel lines of transmission … one line in England … another line in France’.
In Canto IV of ‘Psyche’, Beaumont calls Crashaw ‘my onely worthy self’ (See Martin, The Poems of Crashaw, p. xxxix), while Car went even further and concluded ‘Yes, Car’s Crashawe, he Car’. See Car, ‘The Anagramme’, 1. 3, in Williams (ed.), The Complete Poetry, p. 652.
Watkin in Ward (ed.), The English Way, p. 270, distinguishes Crashaw’s Laudian High-Churchmanship from Anglo-Catholicism as it is now understood, that is, ‘Catholic’ in all but membership
of the Roman Church. But I use the term as employed by Warren, Richard Crashaw, pp. 4–6, and Williams (ed.), The Complete Poetry, p. xvii, to suggest Crashaw thought of himself as English but wished to be member of a national church which retained its Catholic character.
‘On Hope’ concludes the religious verse in both the 1646 and 1648 volumes, but ‘O Gloriosa Domina’ did not appear until 1648, and then under the less inflammatory title ‘The Virgin-Mother’. See Martin, The Poems of Crashaw, pp. 200, 212, 302.
See Williams’ difficulties with this arrangement in The Complete Poetry, p. 138.
Crashaw was disowned by his old mentor John Cosin. Despite the fact that Cosin too had been ejected from his Cambridge seat and lived as an exile in Paris, despite even the conversion of his own son to Catholicism, he stoutly professed his adherence to ‘our old way of Truth; from which no Persecution shall ever drive us’. See Warren, Richard Crashaw, p. 53. Not only the dedicatory ‘Letter to the Countess of Denbigh’ but the dedicatory poem ‘To the Queen’s Majesty’ employs ‘fix’, the key term from the Leyden letter of 1644 where ‘I am not at present purposed for fixing’ (Martin, The Poems of Crashaw, p. xxxi). Richard Strier, ‘Crashaw’s Other Voice’, SEL, vol. IX (1969) pp. 135–6, believes that he wrote the ‘Letter to the Countess of Denbigh’ from a position of unassailable conviction and that the anxiety evident in the poem is for her, not himself. But the agitation which the idea of ‘fixing’ caused Crashaw in his letter raises serious questions about the assumption behind Strier’s poetic analysis. The poet was reluctant to take the irrevocable step of conversion because he knew the pain it would cause not only him but his friends. When Crashaw’s verse letter to the Countess of Denbigh was published separately in 1653, the provocative reference to her delay in joining ‘the Communion of the Catholick Church’ was omitted. Of course, the lady had converted in 1651 and died in 1652 so the clause might be considered superfluous; but its elimination also made the poem more acceptable to a wider English readership.
Crashaw’s strategy here was explained in his poem ‘On Mr. G. Herbert’s booke … sent to a Gentlewoman’: Know you faire, on what you looke? Divinest love lyes in this booke: And though Herberts name doe owe These devotions, fairest; know That while I lay them on the shrine Of your white hand, they are mine. (Williams (ed.), The Complete Poetry, p. 68)
Steven Blakemore, ‘The Name Made Flesh: Crashaw’s Celebration of “The Name Above Every Name”’, CP, vol. XVII (1984) pp. 63–77.
Young, Crashaw and the Spanish Golden Age, pp. 138–9, mentions the Franciscan celebration of the Name on 14 January but opts for the Circumcision. See A. R. Cirillo, ‘Crashaw’s “Epiphany Hymn”: The Dawn of Christian Time’, Studies in Philosophy (SP), vol. LXVII (1970) p. 69, for the history of this feast and its place in the liturgical calendar.
Cunnar, in Cooper (ed.), Essays on Richard Crashaw, pp. 110–19, confines himself to the ‘Hymn to the Name’ and Crashaw’s Sarum usage while Davis, ‘The Meditative Hymnody’, pp. 127–8, concludes that the ordering of the whole Carmen follows the Sarum Breviary in spirit.
The phrase ‘nomen vobis inauditum’ is singularly in keeping with the inexpressibility topos of Crashaw’s sacred poetry but somewhat puzzling. For Toby Mathew had first translated Teresa’s Vida into English in 1623 yet Joseph Beaumont speaks as though her work had only just reached English shores. As no copy of this 1623 translation survives and as Toby Mathew produced another English edition in 1642, may we presume that the earlier version was quickly suppressed? See Warren, ‘Crashaw and St. Teresa’, p. 593.
See Michael McCanles’ pertinent discussion of the rhetorical difficulties Crashaw faced simply in expressing mystical experience, ‘The Rhetoric of the Sublime in Crashaw’s Poetry’, in Thomas O. Sloan and Raymond B. Waddington (eds), The Rhetoric of Renaissance Poetry from Wyatt to Milton (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1974) pp. 189–211, especially pp. 209–10.
Williams, ‘The Preface to the Reader’, The Complete Poetry, p. 650.
See Young, Crashaw and the Spanish Golden Age, p. 72. 40. St Teresa died in 1582 and was canonised in 1622.
Ruether, Mary — The Feminine Face, pp. 73–4, asserts: ‘The disappearance of the independent female image in Protestantism is compensated for by a feminization of the image of Christ, especially in Protestant pietism. The feminized Christ may have something to do with the secularization of public power in modern society. The church then becomes confined to the private, domestic sphere of society’.
Marc F. Bertonasco, ‘A Jungian Reading of Crashaw’s “The Flaming Heart”’, in Cooper (ed.), Essays on Richard Crashaw, p. 245.
See Paul G. Stanwood, ‘Crashaw at Rome’, N&Q, vol. XIII (1966) pp. 256–7; Morey, Catholic Subjects of Elizabeth I, p. 174; Warren, Richard Crashaw, p. 13.
See, for example, The Prioress’ Prologue and Tale where the boy martyr at seven is close in age to Teresa in the ‘Hymn’; is the only child of a poor widow; shows exceptional devotion to the Virgin Mary; and dies singing the Franciscan hymn well known to Crashaw, the Alma Redemptoris. The Works of Geoffrey Chaucer, F. N. Robinson (ed.) (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1961) pp. 161–4.
See Pritchard, ‘Puritan Charges’, fol. 73, and Denis de Rougemont’s discussion of the readings that fired St Teresa’s childhood imagination in Love in the Western World, Montgomery Belgion (trans.) (Princeton University Press, 1983) pp. 159–62.
See their conscious emulation of the Mother and Child in spirit, as noted in passing by Pierre Janelle, Robert Southwell the Writer: A Study in Religious Inspiration (London: Sheed & Ward, 1935) pp. 84, 107–08, 287, and C.C. Martindale, ‘Edmund Campion’, in Ward (ed.), The English Way, pp. 234–7.
‘A crushing of Teresa’s ambitions and inordinate impulses’ is the conclusion that Dobrez reaches in ‘The Crashaw-Teresa Relationship’, pp. 36–7. Failure to distinguish between the erotic metaphors customarily and unself-consciously used by mystics and their actual sexual behaviour is evident in Fischer’s article on ‘Crashaw, Ste. Teresa, and the Icon of Mystical Ravishment’, pp. 183–4, as well. R. G. Collmer, ‘Crashaw’s “Death More Misticall and High”’, JEGP, vol. LV (1956) pp. 379, rightly observes that ‘modern readers … see sex as controlling religious affections and governing the language of religious love. It is, however, one thing to see sexual love supplying words to describe the divine-human relationship, but another thing to assume that sexual love controls the thoughts about divine love’.
Quoted in Wylie Sypher, Four Stages of Renaissance Style: Transformations in Art and Literature 1400–1700 (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1955) p. 163.
I have tampered slightly with the letter but not the spirit of Fischer’s remarks, p. 188. See Jane Tibbetts Schulenburg’s discussion of ‘The Heroics of Virginity, Brides of Christ and Sacrificial Mutilation’, in Rose (ed.), Women in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, p. 48, where Moors feature prominently as rapists of nuns. Significantly for St Teresa’s stance later in ‘The Flaming Heart’, the adoption of male characteristics or appearance was one strategy to avoid attack. See p. 69, n. 97.
Faith is ultimately blind but Loyola was, perhaps, ‘mistaken’ to make his point so emphatically, and in this respect, was less ‘wise’ than Teresa.
Petersson, The Art of Ecstasy, p. 115, notes that the poem simulates ‘the cadences of the day, the seasons, the life-span, and the cadences of the body’ but does not perceive the feminine quality of this internal rhythm. However, feminist discussions such as Catherine F. Smith’s ‘Jane Lead: Mysticism and the Woman Cloathed with the Sun’, in Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar (eds), Shakespeare’s Sisters: Feminist Essays on Women Poets (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1979) pp. 17–18, suggest that the physical experience of women shapes their ecstatic imaginings. Stern, The Flight from Woman, pp. 26–8, has further thoughts along these lines.
In the 1646 edition of the Steps, ‘An Apologie’ follows the ‘Hymn to St. Teresa’; in 1648, it follows both the ‘Hymn’ and the newly added
‘Flaming Heart’. See Martin, The Poems of Crashaw, pp. 136, 322; Austin Warren, ‘Crashaw’s “Apologie”, TLS, 16 November 1935, p. 746; and Davis, ‘The Meditative Hymnody’, p. 109, for accounts of the textual history. Warren accepts that the ‘Apologie’ was written when Crashaw was yet among Protestants while Martin’s notes could suggest that all three poems were written by Crashaw before his conversion. Wallerstein, Style and Poetic Development, p. 53, on the other hand, feels that both the ‘Apologie’ and ‘The Flaming Heart’ were written after Crashaw became a Catholic. I do not see the ‘Song’ which appears in 1648 and again in 1652 after ‘The Flaming Heart’ as completing the Teresa poems. They make a statement as a trilogy, but Davis, p. 113, thinks otherwise.
Car or Miles Pinkney originally came from an ancient family in Durham but was sent, when very young, to the English college at Douay, was tonsured at 21 and ordained at 26 (Dictionary of National Biography, vol. III, pp. 1086–87).
Martin, The Poems of Crashaw, p. 136.
See Bald, A Life, pp. 151–2, 187–8, 256, 330–31.
English draft of Latin inscription in S. Gregorio, Caraman (ed.), The Other Face, p. 141.
See sacred epigram ‘Dominus apud suos vilis’, in Williams (ed.), The Complete Poetry, p. 309.
Allchin, ‘Our Lady in Seventeenth-century Anglican Devotion and Theology’, in The Blessed Virgin Mary, p. 66.
Martin, The Poems of Crashaw, p. xxxvi.
See Williams (ed.), The Complete Poetry, p. 62, who quotes ch. XXIX from Mathew’s The Flaming Hart. All direct references to the transverberation are taken from this passage.
Stanwood, ‘Time and Liturgy in Donne and Crashaw’, p. 102, observes that ‘Crashaw recalls one ritual in performing another’. Williams (ed.), The Complete Poetry, p. 61, exclaims: ‘Surely it is remarkable that Crashaw should at the end of his life have returned to English forms and Anglican ways to sustain this most Roman and Counter-Reformation ecstasy’. Camden, ‘Richard Crashaw’s Poetry’, p. 277, continues the argument: ‘It is remarkable only if we assume that Crashaw’s ecstasy must have its foundation in Roman theology.… Crashaw’s ecstasy is rooted in return, in the backward steps to the mother which find him rehearsing the earliest forms of his religious experience. And the forms of the Anglican service, particularly the repetitive, comforting parallelism and anaphore echoed in these lines, were no doubt integrated by the poet in the childhood attendance of the Anglican service shared with his mother’.
The poet has been accused of being overly familiar in his use of the term ‘freind’; and indeed it does appear not only in the Teresa poems but such disparate works as ‘Dies Irae’ (XVII), ‘Letter to the Countess of Denbigh’ (1. 57), ‘Ode on a Prayer-book’ (l. 32), ‘The Weeper’ (XVI), ‘Hymn to the Name’ (ll. 198, 208), and ‘Sancta Maria Dolorum’ (XI). Crashaw may have been indifferent to decorum but not to Herbert’s use of ‘Freind’ in The Temple.
See Monica Furlong’s discussion of this saint’s ‘Little Way’ in Teresa of Lisieux (London: Virago, 1987) especially pp. 4–7, 95–7; and Maggie Ross, The Fountain and The Furnace: The Way of Tears and Fire (New York: Paulist, 1987) p. 168, whose work I came across shortly before publication.
Crashaw, Sermon at the Crosse, p. 68.
Abraham Cowley elegises: How well (blest Swan) did Fate contrive thy death; And made thee render up thy tuneful breath In thy great Mistress Arms? thou most divine And richest Off’ering of Loretto’s shrine! (ll. 37–40)
It is worth noting that Mathew’s Flaming Hart remarks in its title that Teresa’s Carmelite Order was officially ‘the Order of the All-Immaculate Virgin-Mother, our Blessed Lady, of Mount-Carmel’ (Martin, The Poems of Crashaw, p. 437).
By Docherty, Donne, Undone, pp. 10, 189, 218, 231, 247.
Even Stafford, The Femall Glory, p. A2, is highly critical of the extravagances of Loreto and it would appear from ‘On the Blessed Virgins bashfulnesse’ that Crashaw fervently agreed. Stafford prefixes The Femall Glory with the lyrical promise: Yet would I not idolatrize thy worth, Like some, whose superstition sets thee forth In costly ornaments, in cloaths so gay, So rich as never in the Stable lay. These make thy Statues now as famous be For pride, as thou wert for Humility. I cannot thinke thy Virgin bashfulnesse Would weare the Lady of Lorettos dresse. See Sabine, ‘Introduction’ to Stafford, The Femall Glory, pp. 11–12.
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© 1992 Maureen Sabine
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Sabine, M. (1992). No Assumption Shall Deny Us. In: Feminine Engendered Faith. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230372580_7
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