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
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