Richard Crashaw's Shepherd's Hymn

From Richard Crashaw's Steps to the Temple.

Chorus. Come, we shepherds whose blest sight 

Hath met Love's noon in Nature's night ; 

Come lift up our loftier song, 

And wake the sun that lies too long.

To all our world of well-stol'n joy 

He slept, and dreamt of no such thing, 

While we found out Heaven's fairer eye, 

And kissed the cradle of our King ;

Tell him he rises now too late 

To show us aught worth looking at.

Tell him we now can show him more 

Than he e'er show'd to mortal sight, 

Than he himself e'er saw before, 

Which to be seen needs not his light : 

Tell him, Tityrus, where th' hast been, 

Tell him, Thyrsis, what th' hast seen.

Tityrus. Gloomy night embraced the place 

Where the noble infant lay : 

The babe look'd up, and show'd His face ; 

In spite of darkness it was day. 

It was Thy day, sweet, and did rise, 

Not from the East, but from Thy eyes. 

Chorus. It was Thy day, sweet, &c.

Thrysis. Winter chid aloud, and sent The angry 

North to wage his wars : 

The North forgot his fierce intent, 

And left perfumes instead of scars. 

By those sweet eyes' persuasive powers, 

Where he meant frosts he scatter'd flowers. 

Chorus. By those sweet eyes', &c.

Both. We saw Thee in Thy balmy nest, 

Young dawn of our eternal day ; 

We saw Thine eyes break from the East, 

And chase the trembling shades away : 

We saw Thee, and we blest the sight, 

We saw Thee by Thine own sweet light.

Full Chorus. Welcome all wonders in one sight ! 

Eternity shut in a span ! 

Summer in winter ! day in night ! 

Heaven in earth ! and God in man ! 

Great little one, whose all-embracing birth 

Lifts earth to Heaven, stoops Heaven to earth !

Welcome, tho' nor to gold, nor silk, 

To more than Cæsar's birthright is : 

Twin sister seas of virgin's milk, 

With many a rarely-temper'd kiss, 

That breathes at once both maid and mother, 

Warms in the one, cools in the other.

She sings Thy tears asleep, and dips 

Her kisses in Thy weeping eye : 

She spreads the red leaves of Thy lips, 

That in their buds yet blushing lie. 

She 'gainst those mother diamonds tries 

The points of her young eagle's eyes.

Read the rest here. Crashaw's poem has been redacted into a Christmas carol, At the Nativity or Gloomy Night Embraced the Place. As befitting a man of classical university education, Crashaw uses names from ancient Latin and Greek bucolic poetry: Tityrus is the name of a shepherd poet in Virgil's Eclogues and Thrysis is the shepherd who tells the story of Daphnis in Theocritus' first Idyll.

Pope Benedict XVI spoke about the shepherds at the nativity in his homily for Midnight Mass in 2009:

The Lord is here. From this moment, God is truly “God with us”. No longer is he the distant God who can in some way be perceived from afar, in creation and in our own consciousness. He has entered the world. He is close to us. The words of the risen Christ to his followers are addressed also to us: “Lo, I am with you always, to the close of the age” (Mt 28:20). For you the Saviour is born: through the Gospel and those who proclaim it, God now reminds us of the message that the Angel announced to the shepherds. It is a message that cannot leave us indifferent. If it is true, it changes everything. If it is true, it also affects me. Like the shepherds, then, I too must say: Come on, I want to go to Bethlehem to see the Word that has occurred there. The story of the shepherds is included in the Gospel for a reason. They show us the right way to respond to the message that we too have received. What is it that these first witnesses of God’s incarnation have to tell us?

The first thing we are told about the shepherds is that they were on the watch – they could hear the message precisely because they were awake. We must be awake, so that we can hear the message. We must become truly vigilant people. . . .

Merry Christmas to All!

Richard Crashaw's Hymn to "The Name and Honour" of St. Teresa of Avila

As today is her feast, it seems appropriate to post Richard Crashaw's poetic tribute to St. Teresa of Avila. As Robert T. Petersson notes in his book, The Art of Ecstasy: Teresa, Bernini, and Crashaw, St. Teresa was one of many leaders of the Counter Reformation in Spain. Petersson states that Spanish reformers led the way, in fact, from St. Ignatius of Loyola to St. Teresa and St. John of the Cross, in the efforts to renew and revive the Catholic Church after the Protestant Reformation.

LOVE, thou are absolute, sole Lord
Of life and death. To prove the word,
We'll now appeal to none of all
Those thy old soldiers, great and tall,
Ripe men of martyrdom, that could reach down
With strong arms their triumphant crown:
Such as could with lusty breath
Speak loud, unto the face of death,
Their great Lord's glorious name; to none
Of those whose spacious bosoms spread a throne
For love at large to fill. Spare blood and sweat:
We'll see Him take a private seat,
And make His mansion in the mild
And milky soul of a soft child.
Scarce has she learnt to lisp a name
Of martyr, yet she thinks it shame
Life should so long play with that breath
Which spent can buy so brave a death.
She never undertook to know
What death with love should have to do.
Nor has she e'er yet understood
Why, to show love, she should shed blood;
Yet, though she cannot tell you why,
She can love, and she can die.
Scarce has she blood enough to make
A guilty sword blush for her sake;
Yet has a heart dares hope to prove
How much less strong is death than love....

Since 'tis not to be had at home,
She'll travel for a martyrdom.
No home for her, confesses she,
But where she may a martyr be.
She'll to the Moors, and trade with them
For this unvalued diadem;
She offers them her dearest breath,
With Christ's name in 't, in charge for death:
She'll bargain with them, and will give
Them God, and teach them how to live
In Him; or, if they this deny,
For Him she'll teach them how to die.
So shall she leave amongst them sown
Her Lord's blood, or at least her own.

Farewell then, all the world, adieu!
Teresa is no more for you.
Farewell all pleasures, sports, and joys,
Never till now esteemed toys!

Farewell whatever dear may be--
Mother's arms, or father's knee!
Farewell house, and farewell home!
She 's for the Moors and Martyrdom.

Sweet, not so fast; lo! thy fair spouse,
Whom thou seek'st with so swift vows,
Calls thee back, and bids thee come
T' embrace a milder martyrdom....

O how oft shalt thou complain
Of a sweet and subtle pain!
Of intolerable joys!
Of a death, in which who dies
Loves his death, and dies again,
And would for ever so be slain;
And lives and dies, and knows not why
To live, but that he still may die!
How kindly will thy gentle heart
Kiss the sweetly-killing dart!
And close in his embraces keep
Those delicious wounds, that weep
Balsam, to heal themselves with thus,
When these thy deaths, so numerous,
Shall all at once die into one,
And melt thy soul's sweet mansion;
Like a soft lump of incense, hasted
By too hot a fire, and wasted
Into perfuming clouds, so fast
Shalt thou exhale to heaven at last
In a resolving sigh, and then,--
O what? Ask not the tongues of men.

Read the rest here.

Richard Crashaw was a Catholic convert from Anglicanism at a dangerous time--during the English Civil War. After being born the son of a most anti-Catholic, Puritan, father, William Crashaw, he had attended Pembroke College at Cambridge, a High-Church Anglican college and been a fellow at Peterhouse College, but was too Catholic for that oldest of Cambridge colleges. He fled to the Continent in 1644 and, destitute, was introduced to Queen Henrietta Maria in exile at St. Germain-en-Laye by a friend Abraham Cowley. From St. Germain he went to Rome and died soon after becoming sub-canon the Cathedral of Santa Casa in Loretto. He is  not only one of the Metaphysical Poets, but he is a Baroque poet. The St. Austin Review featured Crashaw in the September/October 2013 issue as "English Poet; Catholic Exile"; the cover is pictured above.

The Baroque and St. Teresa of Avila

The October issue of The New Criterion has an article by F.H. Buckley, "Men of the Baroque: the sculptor & the poet"; you have to subscribe to The New Criterion to see the article on-line. Buckley examines the Baroque interpretation of St. Teresa of Avila's great ecstasy in the sculpture of Bernini and the poetry of Crashaw.

Allow me to share a couple of quotations:

As a style, the Baroque was not rude and irregular, like the Gothic; nor was it refined and simple, like the High Renaissance Palladian; nor had it the Rococo's affectation and irony. Like the Gothic it communicated a sense of awe, but with an exuberance entirely foreign to the Gothic, Like the Palladian it adhered to classical forms, but with a transcendent vision the Palladian lacked. It shaded into the eighteenth-century Rococo, but had a symmetry and grandeur that the Rococo mocked. (pp. 33-34)

Discussing why the Baroque style is not well represented the United States, Buckley comments that it "pre-dated the American colonies" and "as an expression of the Catholic Counter-Reformation is was wholly alien to the country's religious traditions" because it was too triumphalist and sensual for Catholics in America, who were "tinged with an austere Jansenism" (p. 35).

He points out two examples of the Baroque in the United States: Frederick Hart's Ex Nihilo at Washington's National Cathedral and St. Xavier del Bac in Tucson, Arizona.

 

Reading this article lead me to find a book about the connections between the saint, the sculptor and the poet: The Art of Ecstasy: Teresa, Bernini, and Crashaw by Robert T. Petersson (New York: Atheneum, 1974)--first published in 1970 and winner of the National Catholic Book Award in 1971. Professor Petersson retired from Smith College in 1985 and died in 2011. He also wrote a book about Sir Kenelm Digby, son of one of the Gunpowder Plotters (Sir Everard Digby, cousin of Anne Vaux).

Richard Crashaw, Baroque Metaphysical Poet

Richard Crashaw, born around 1613 in London, joined the Catholic Church in France while in exile from the Civil War in England. His father is commonly called a "strongly anti-Catholic" Anglican divine who yet had an interest in Jesuit Latin hymns.

Crashaw studied at Cambridge and took his BA at Pembroke in 1634 and his MA at Peterhouse in 1638, becoming the vicar at the Church of St. Mary the Less. He was influenced by George Herbert's poetry, friends with Abraham Cowley and even visited Nicholas Farrar at Little Gidding--securely in the Anglican High Church community. The Church of St. Mary the Less, called so to distinguish it from the University Church of St. Mary the Great, still calls itself an Anglo-Catholic church today.

He was forced from his Fellowship at Peterhouse in 1644 and fled the country. In Paris he became destitute; Abraham Cowley brought him to the attention of the exiled Queen Henrietta Maria who gained him some patronage from a Roman Cardinal. He lived for a time at the Venerable English College in Rome. Crashaw became upset with the licentious behavior of some of the Cardinal's retinue however and was moved to Loreto for safety, as a Canon of the Holy House. Soon after his arrival there he died, on August 25, 1649. There is a rumor of poisoning by that faction of the Cardinal's retinue.

Richard Crashaw is one of the Metaphysical Poets, remarkable for the brilliance and extravagance of his language and imagery. Here is an example of his simpler style of verse:

Two went up to the Temple to Pray

Two went to pray? Or rather say
One went to brag, th'other to pray

One stands up close and treads on high,
Where th'other dates not lend his eye.

One nearer to God's altar trod;
The other to the altar's God.

Crashaw was also influenced by the mysticism of St. Teresa of Avila and composed three poems in her honor, the most famous being "The Flaming Heart."

Abraham Cowley wrote an elegy to his friend, praising him as "poet and saint" and proclaiming that he, Abraham, "a Catholic will be/So far at least, Great Saint, to pray to thee" while defending Crashaw's leaving the Church of England for "Error"!