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Richard Crashaw

    two realities: Love and Strife. For him, unlike Donne and Herbert, Love prevails.
    - turns from classical to Jesuit epigram tradition--New Testament religious themes
    - "Over-ripeness is all"--Douglas Bush
    - mystical tradition of erotic imagery
Symbolism--See Austin Warren's Richard Crashaw: A Study in Baroque Sensibility.
    - communal Christian symbols
    - mellifluously musical, lavishly imagistic
    - ascetic life, devoting senses to the service of God
    - Magdalene "changed her object, not her passion"--Augustine
    - uninhibited and uncensored
    - little or no classical imagery (like Herbert)--deliberate surrendering of erudition
Figures:
    - paradoxes (Incarnation--father becomes son of Mary who is her father)
    - no "homely" fireside images (unlike Herbert)
    - financial metaphors
    - breakfast (but of angels, not men)
    - conventional flora (lily, rose, balsam) and fauna (bee, eagle, dove, lamb, phoenix)
    - Colors: red or purple=pasion, fire
      black=sin, mortality, mourning
      white=purity, synthesis of all colors (glory)
      No green (nature) or blue (truth, Virgin)
    - Senses -- less sight than sound, especially taste and feeling
     - "sweet" and "delicious" mingle fragrance and taste--symbolic of heightened,
    transcended divine senses; liquids can be drunk (milk, blood, water (tears), and wine;
     -touch, similarly (sexual passion, pain, heat, chill--supremities of touch are "experienced in the mystical wound of love in martyrdom and nuptial union)
Imagination operates like love--synthesizing power:
    ". . . his aesthetic method may be interpreted as a genuine equivalent of his belief, as its translation into a rhetoric of metamorphosis. If, in the Gospels, water changes to win and wine to blood, Crashaw was but imaginatively extending this principle when her turned tears into pearls, pearls into lilies, lilies in pure Innocents.  Style must incarnate spirit." Crashaw engages senses to "intimate a world that transcends them"--Austin Warren
     
    - sensory is transcended, not rejected.
    - Poetry frequently unites opposites: fire and water, milk and blood=untion of passion and purity, pain and pleasure
    - Frequent phantasmagorical blending of disparate images

 

Mary Adams
828.227.3269