Richard Crashaw, Steps to the Temple, The Delights of the Muses (1646) and Carmen Deo Nostro (1652)

Genre: devotional poetry, experimenting with metaphysical imagery borrowed from the continental tradition of the religious mystics (esp. St. Teresa of Avila) and from visual art forms associated with Catholic celebrations of saints' sufferings and mystics' visions.

Form: mainly tetrameter couplets, with some metrical experiments in alternating tetrameter and dimeter ("Infant Martyrs").

Characters: saints and innocents, Jesus and the angels.

Summary: Crashaw is the foremost exponent of the style that critics now call (after W. Sypher, 1955) the Baroque [from the French for an irregularly shaped pearl, perhaps from the Arabic (buraq) for stony or pebbled ground].  Baroque style resolves the agonized conflicts of Mannerism, which we see in the metaphysical conceits of Donne, Herbert, and some Herrick.  Those poets created exotic and self-consciously inappropriate metaphors (lover-Beloved are like the feet of the navigator's compass, in Donne's "Validiction: Forbidding Mourning") to lure the reader into a felt appreciation of their emotional distress beyond the immediate stimulus of the poem's situation (they're parting for a while, but their grief makes his language search for near impossible comparisons).  T.S. Eliot, in his essay on Shakespeare's Hamlet,  said such poetic overstatement (in Hamlet's case, his response to the situation of the play) lacks an "objective correlative" or sufficient motive in the context to warrant the bizarre poetic response (Sypher 192).   The baroque poet, like Crashaw or Milton (in Paradise Lost, not "Lycidas"), chooses a subject so grand and so passionately engaging that the poem's language overflows into massive scenes, exotic images with complex decoration that fills all available space with variations on the main theme, and a tendency to develop the physical sense of a poetic metaphor into all its possible comparative significances (see Crashaw's "On the Wounds of our Crucified Lord," 1390).

Comments on Individual Poems:

• "To the Infant Martyrs"--how does its use of "Milk" conflate the cosmic and the earthly to achieve a religious significance?

• "I Am the Door"--The "door" in question is the spear wound delivered by the centurion at the Crucifixion--in what sense is the centurion locked out by the wound that opens the door of salvation?

• "On the Wounds of Our Crucified Lord"--How does the poetic strategy of comparison between wounds and body parts resemble the strategies of the earlier, Petrarchan poets describing the beloved's body, and how does the occasion differ?

• "On Our Crucified Lord, Naked and Bloody"--compare this with Herbert's use of the crucifixion motif--what changes does the baroque poet make?

• "In the Holy Nativity of Our Lord God..."--This is a divine pastoral of a rather traditional sort, but notice how the paradox of a universe-creating god in an infant's form sets up a series of fantastic notions (e.g., the "bed for this huge birth" in l. 41 and the idea of "Eternity shut in a span" in l. 80).

• "Non Vi"--the locked heart emblem is familiar from emblem books (see note, 1394), but also resembles the heart-shaped books familiar from the late medieval and early renaissance.  The poem (like some of Donne's) visualizes the struggle of faith as a battle in a civil war fought to win consent to a just rule.
  • How does the poem's size, when compared with Donne's sonnet 14, for instance, reflect Crashaw's Baroque sensibilities?
  • Click here to read Eric Jager's essay about the history of the heart as a symbolic device in literature and culture (also see his The History of the Heart, Chicago: U Chicago P, 2000).

• "The Flaming Heart..."--This evocation of St. Teresa of Avila's mystical testaments may have drawn directly upon a baroque sculpture by Bernini (see Norton introduction, 1396).  To see the sculpture, depicting the angel with the flaming arrow about to pierce her heart, click here.   The postures and expressions of the white marble figures appear to be referred to directly in the poem.
  • How might this kind of "multi-media poetry" suggest a new approach to the arts which might result in the rise of new forms, including opera (also see "Non Vi" with its emblem, above)?
  Note, too, how Crashaw takes Donne's strategy of multiplying the active verbs for the ecstatic event and attaches them to an even longer list of outcomes which develop the cosmic consequences of this experience (ll. 79-80 and 94-108).

Issues and Research Sources:

1. If Marvell underwent a kind of temporary isolation, Crashaw was not merely forgotten in the next century, but openly mocked (see Norton introduction, 1389).
   • What does that tell us about variations in style, and what might that mean for our contemporary attitudes toward Crashaw's work?

2. Can Crashaw and the rest of the baroque artists be compared with any movements in recent popular music, given their interests in exotic materialist imagery, working out grotesque and delirious variations on impassioned themes, etc.?  Can the style known as baroque be attached, as Sypher tries to do, to an era's theological or political struggles, and if so, what in our own time might produce such movements?

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