Anthony D. Cousins, The Catholic Religious Poets; From Southwell to Crashaw

Anthony D. Cousins, The Catholic Religious Poets; From Southwell to Crashaw, Sheed and Ward, London, 1991.

To appreciate the verse of the Catholic religious poets it is essential to know something of the main devotional literary traditions on which they draw… They number five: the theory of the plain style as a Christian rhetorical mode in Tudor times; the practice of the plain style in Tudor religious verse; Counter-Reformation poetic theory (chiefly Jesuit); the theory of the emblem; ideas of meditation (again, chiefly Jesuit). (1)

That tradition derived ultimately from St Augustine, who and established the plain style as a Christian rhetorical mode in De Doctrina Christiana, and whilst it was therefore not natively English it had nonetheless been in England long before the sixteenth century. … But Augustine’s already influential thinking on the plain style was significantly consolidated in Tudor England by the Sileni Alcibiadis (1515) of Erasmus, where the saint’s ideas were affirmed and elaborate upon by a modern writer himself widely influential among members of the old faith and to be so among those of the new. (2)

Augustine argues that through his compassionate humility the Logos, the Divine Wisdom, “accommodated” himself to mankind: first, by his Incarnation; second, by embodying his divine truth in the simplicity of his preaching. (3)

The second aspect of Christ’s accommodation of himself to human frailty, his preaching, is described by Augustine in Pauline terms: “Thus in the Wisdom of God the world could not know God through Wisdom. Why did He come… unless it pleased God, by the foolishness of preaching, to save them that believe?” (1, 12, 12). The lowly simplicity of Christ’s the Bible as a whole—characteristic, in other words, of the way God communicates with man (2, 42, 63). In The Confessions Augustine remarks of the Bible: /

[Y]ea, and the authority of that Book appeared so much the more venerable, and so much the more worthy of our religious credit, by how much the readier at hand it was for all to read upon, preserving [3] yet the majesty of the secret under the profoundness of the meaning, offering itself unto all in words most open, and in a style of speaking most humble, and exercising the attention of such as are not light of heart; that it might by that means waft over some few towards thee: yet are these few a good many more than they would have been, had it not obtained the eminency of such high authority, nor alluded on those companies with a bosom of holy humility. (6, 5) /

For Augustine, then, the principle of accommodation lies at the very heart of God’s entering history in the person of Christ: thus his centering of ancient rhetorical theory on Christ actually means a centering of it on Christ’s accommodation. (4)

Augustine argues in De Doctrina Christiana that when a speaker of orator, motivated by charity, wishes to teach divine truth he must do so plainly, accommodating it even to the weakest mind: /

But in all [his] utterances [he] should first of all seek to speak so that [he] may be understood, speaking in so far as [he is] able with such clarity that either [the listener] who does not understand is very slow or that the difficulty and subtlety lie not in the manner of speaking but in the things which [he wishes] to explain and show, so that this is the reason why [he is] understood less, or more slowly. (4,8,22; cf. 1, 22, 20 and 1, 37, 41) /

He concludes: “The speaker should not consider the eloquence of his teaching but the clarity of it” (4, 9, 23; cf. 4, 10, 24). (4)

Augustine proposes that the other two styles of rhetoric should be drawn on when lucid instruction alone is not enough to impress divine truth upon the listener (4, 12, 27-28). In asserting that, Augustine radically alters Ciceronian theory. He agrees with Cicero that the speaker must have command of all three styles (the plain to instruct, the middle to delight, the high to move—see 4, 12, 27 and Orator, 29, 100) but he gives primacy to the plain style whereas Cicero, countering his Atticist detractors, had insisted that in particular the true and complete orator must have mastery of the high style. For Augustine the last is the first and the first inferior: the plain style (which Cicero and others had thought relatively unimportant) takes first place because it leads to salvation; the high style (which Cicero and others had thought most important because of its persuasive force) takes a lesser place with the middle style, for it is useful to the Christian speaker, but inessential (4, 12, 28). The elemental difference between the rhetorical theories of the two thinkers seems to be as follows: Cicero argues that the high style promotes civilized life in the cities of men; for Augustine, as for St. Paul, Christ has shown that through the plain style men can be led to eternal life in the City of God. At once adopting what is usable form pagan rhetoric (cf. 2, 40, 60-61; 4, 2-3) and engaging in a dialogue with Ciceronian theory, Augustine models the true and complete Christian speaker on Christ himself, implying that his “foolishness of preaching” revalued and revolutionized the ancient rhetorical tradition (1, 12,-15; 2, 40-42). (4-5)

Erasmus… unfolds his ideas in Sileni Alcibiadis (from the 1515 edition of the Adages), a work which shows how creative an heir he is of Augustinian thought. There Erasmus uses the figurine called a “Silenus” as the symbolic centerpiece of his argument. A “Silenus” was an image of a flute player, and upon opening it one found that the figurine concealed the form of a god. Erasmus proposes that history is variously patterned by men who resemble Sileni: externally unattractive, poor, socially insignificant, but transcendentally wise and noble within. … Erasmus’ account of Socrates, one of his favorites, illustrates the public appearance and behavior of the Sileni as well as their inner nature: /

He took no care of his appearance, and his language was plain, unvarnished, and unpretentious, as befits a man who was always taking about charioteers, workmen fullers, and blacksmiths. [6] …

Erasmus implies that Socrates’ life—like the lives of all the other Sileni—centers on a twofold accommodation: embodying a divine wisdom humbly; conveying that wisdom in plain and lowly speech. In other words, Socrates and his fellows are types of Christ, either prefiguring him or subsequently reflecting him. … ‘The parables of the Gospel, if you take them at face value—who would not think that they came from a simple ignorant man? And yet if you crack the nut, you find inside that profound wisdom, truly divine, a touch of something which is clearly like Christ himself (p. 276) (6-7)

So whilst the plain style is identified as the inevitable Christian rhetorical mode, for Erasmus it also forms part of history’s inner pattern, the Silenus tradition. When he who seeks to teach divine wisdom uses the plain style he allies himself with the essential civilizing energies, as Erasmus seems them, in western culture—he takes sides with the foolishness of Socrates and with the folly of the cross against the Folly of the world. (8)

[The practice of the plain style in Tudor religious verse] As can be seen in the preceding discussion, when St Augustine and Erasmus advocate the plain style they are in fact referring to the Attic version of it: that form of the plain style which, as Cicero had described it, has a conversational immediacy of tone and informality of rhythm, a pellucid diction, a virtual lack of ornament (in the guise of the figures of speech) and, in keeping with that, a use of metaphor to crystiallize meaning rather than to beautify (see Orator, 75-90). St Augustine distinctly indicates that the rhetorical model by which he judges plain speech is Cicero’s description of the Attic plain style. Erasmus, himself an admirer of Attic simplicity, puts forward Socrates as his type of the orator humilis, and as Socrates was a familiar Ciceronian exemplar of Attic plainness, (8)

It is not very surprising, then, to see the pervasiveness in Tudor religious verse of a plain style which can be more accurately called Attic [8] than anything else. The long tradition of Augustinian influence on Christian rhetoric, the current prestige of this thought the its recent restatement by Erasmus, … (8-9)

To illustrate something of the continuity and variety in the practice of that plain style as a religious mode by Tudor poets before Southwell, one can usefully focus on the writings of Surrey, Vaux, and Huggarde. Surrey illustrates the use of the plain style in scriptural paraphrase, Vaux its use in the religious lyric, the Huggarde its use in the poetry of religious debate. /
Surrey paraphrased six of the psalms, numbers 8, 31, 51, 55, 73, and 88. … psalmists’ words into plain, contemporary speech. (9)

[Aspects of Counter-Reformation poetic theory to 1649] Whilst the Catholic poets make significant use of the religious plain style, as do their Protestant contemporaries, they also draw on ideas of poetry in which the Protestant poets have little interest or to which they have distinctive counterparts. Those ideas derive from poetic theory and practice in the European-Reformation, many being motifs in post-Tridentine discussion of poetry; they can be seen representatively in the critical writings of Pontanus, Tasso, and Gracian—two celebrated Jesuits, a more celebrated poet, and all of them influential. (Again, four of the poets considered below are Jesuits and three others write in apparently close contact with Jesuit thought; one would not want to deny, however, Marino’s contributory influence on Crashaw.) Examining Pontanus’s Peticarus Institutionum Libri Tres, Tasso’s Discourses on the Heroic Poem, and Gracian’s The Mind’s Wit and Art thus forms a useful guide to Counter-Reformation poetic theory to 1649, that is, until the death of Crashaw. (16)

Jesuit poetic theory… the moral principles embodied in human art are considered as identical to those embodied in the divine art of the creation; finally, that true poetry is thought to achieve a reconciliation of pleasure and virtue (an old theme again being reworked). (17)

But how is the moral ordering of the individual’s life to be achieved? Pontanus warns that the poet should not attempt it by a direct appeal to the reader’s reason, but by an appeal primarily to the reader’s sense and thence emotions. The poet should reject divisions, definitions, calm reasoning, logical inquiry, and rely on the most euphonious (with overtones of being elaborate) diction, sensuously compelling images, to stir up the emotion and so entice the reader or carry him away. (17)

For Pontanus, then, poetry certainly instructs and delights but he describes how it does so in ways that would have seemed unusual to most readers of Sidney or Puttenham. Pontanus advocates that poetry should sensuously impress moral thought upon the reader, controlling the senses to achieve control of the emotions: persuasion is seen as a matter of directing the passions rather than in terms of logical acuteness. (Of course the poet himself, Pontanus adds, should remain distanced from the emotional texture of his work—he should be tranquil and guided by judgment.) (18)

Recognizing Pontanus’s theory of poetry as connected with what we identify as the baroque means appreciating its relation to (for example) the paintings of Annibale Carracci, Lanfranco, and Pietro da Cortona—it also means appreciating how alien his theory therefore is to English poetry theory and to most English poetic practice until 1649. To suggest Pontanus’s affinities with the baroque is also, of course, to imply that if Tasso and Gracian significantly resemble him in their thinking on poetry then they too have links with the baroque. (18-19)

A consideration of Tasso’s Discourses on the Heroic Poem reveals at once the resemblances of his thought to Pontanus’s. There seem to be three main resemblances: Tasso’s view on the true end of poetry; his notion of how that end is, in general terms, to be reached; and his stress on the persuasive force of the marvelous. (19)

Tasso observes … ‘We should at least grant that the end of poetry is not just any enjoyment [as Horace might be taken to imply] but only that which is coupled with virtue, since it is utterly unworthy of a good poet to give the pleasure of reading about base and dishonest deeds, but proper to give the pleasure of learning together with virtue’ (p. 11) (19)

Tasso remarks: ‘The epic poem ought therefore to afford its own delight with its own effect—which is perhaps to move wonder…’ (p. 15; ‘e questa peraventura [e] il mover maraviglia…’). … Tasso’s stress on “maraviglia” also reveals the connection of his thought on poetry’s persuasiveness with critical ideals such as stupore. (20)

Turning from Pontanus and Tasso to Gracian might seem at first to imply discontinuity, for the title of Gracian’s work, The Mind’s Wit and Art, suggests that he focuses upon the purely cerebral as those earlier critics do not. In fact, however, the similarities among the works of the three men are more striking and important that the differences. From the start of his work Gracian stresses the affective power of the creative intellect. He concentrates upon the conceit as the chief embodiment of the mind’s wit and art, saying that “what beauty is for the eyes and harmony for the ears, the conceit is for the understanding.” … The nature of that beauty—and thus essentially of the conceit, in which it is crystallized—Gracian observes as consisting “in an exquisite agreement, a harmonious correlation between two or three perceptible extremes, expressed by an act of the understanding” (2, 97). He goes on: “Thus the conceit may be defined: it is an act of the understanding which vividly expresses the apt relation that is found between objects” (20)

Gracian rhapsodizes: “[Producing wit] is a calling for cherubim, and exaltation of man’s mind that carries us to the summit of a strange, fanciful hierarchy” (2, 92). Producing wit, Gracian implies, makes the human mind resemble the angelic intelligence, which intuits—or directly perceives—accurately manifests the inner and divine structure of things. Moreover, the sense of wonder emanating form Gracian’s words about wit’s production helps to explain why his treatise so pervasively identifies wonder as an effect of wit. (21)

Yet the poetic theories of the three men also, if unexpectedly, harmonize with the critical thought of St Augustine. As has been argued above, Augustine posits the plain style as the truly Christian mode of discourse, for the first priority of Christian communication is a lucid conveying of divine truth. But he says as well that when telling the plain truth is not enough, then one must seek to delight and to move the reader (or listener, in the case of oratory)—an argument familiar from the classical rhetorical theory. (22)

[Aspects of emblem theory and practice to 1649] The emblem (usually, the combination of a motto, picture, and poem) puts before the reader’s eyes words and image focused on a conceit. (22)

…emblem theory and practice of broadly two kinds: the first, in general, secular; the second, not only Counter-Reformation but strongly Jesuit. (22)

Adopting Plato’s distinction between icastic and fantastic art, Plotinus regards most pictures as fantastic shadows, as image having no substantial contact with reality. But he also believes that it is indeed possible to discern within a picture something of an Idea “and so [be] called to recollection of the truth” (2, 9, 16; cf. 1, 6, 1-1, 6, 4). A striking instance of that for Plotinus is the Egyptian hieroglyphs; he considers them to be pictures centered upon absolute truth, ideal Forms (5,8,6). It is implicit in such accounts of icastic pictures or images that Plotinus thinks of icastic art as evoking meditation and drawing the contemplative mind from sensuous perception to spiritual insight. That implied linking of a visual image to meditation is to become consummately explicit in Counter-Reformation emblem books; however, for the moment it need be said only that Plotinus’s account of the Egyptian hieroglyphs becomes elemental to Renaissance emblematics. (22-3)

…belief that emblems embody universal truths. (23)

Not everyone in the English Renaissance of course so philosophical a view of emblems. Puttenham airily dispenses with the niceties of emblem theory to assert merely that emblems either please or instruct, for they exist “to insinuat some secret, wittie, morall and braue purpose presented to the beholder, either to recreate his eye, or please his phantasie, or examine his iudgement, or occupie his braine or to manage his will either by hope or by dread…’ Even so, the more comprehensive European thinking on emblems is nonetheless taken seriously by Englishmen. Daniel translates Paolo Giovio but, more important, Blout translates Estienne in The Art of Making Devises (1646). (23)

The resemblances among those accounts of emblem and poetic image imply that the affective, baroque aesthetic informing Counter-Reformation poetic theory may also be found in Counter-Reformation emblems. (25)

Not all Vaenius’s texts are as emotive as those of “Incipiendum”; even so, the pictures in his other emblems are insistently affective, (27)

[Aspects of meditative theory in the Counter-Reformation to 1649] The ideas on meditation formulated during the Counter-Reformation influence the Catholic poets no less significantly than do Counter-Reformation ideas on poetry and on the emblem. In particular the verse of the Catholic poets reflect the meditative theories of St Ignatius Loyola and of St Francis de Sales—the theory of the former because so many of the Catholic religious poets are either Jesuit-influenced; that of the latter because of his works’ popularity at Little Gidding and fashionableness at the court of Henrietta Maria (30)

In the Enneads Plotinus argues that man is a triadic creature who perfects himself by contemplation of the Divine Triad, in whose likeness he has been made. Plotinus’s notion was to prove elemental to St Augustine’s understanding of the human soul… for the art of meditation the most important of those was to be the soul’s possession of memory, understanding, and love. To explain that, one has to consider for a moment what St Augustine says in De Trinitate about wisdom. He describes wisdom as “the intellectual cognizance of eternal things,” requiring “a contemplative life.” (30)

Augustine thus associates the getting of wisdom, contemplation, concentrating the soul on God, and self-perfeciton. Many of the heirs to his thought would do likewise, some of them doing so specifically in the context of meditative theory. That is true of St Bonaventure and of Walter Hilton to name but two; more to the point here, it is also true of St Ignatius Loyola. (31)

The meditative theory of St Ignatius, and its relation to the tradition of Augustinian thought, have been treated as familiar knowledge ever since Lous L. Martz’s graceful The Poetry of Meditation (1954) first described each to students of Renaissance literature. (31)

An Ignatian meditation starts with a preparatory prayer in which the self is subjected and offered to God. Following the prayer are two “preludes” : the first, a compositio loci (“composition of place”); the second, a request for emotions in keeping with the theme of the mediation. The compositio loci, or picturing to oneself of the scene and circumstances of what is being contemplated, has been much discussed in relation to the techniques of individual religious poets; (31)

Puttenham’s account of demonstratio is neatly analogous, for he refers to it as description “in such sort as it should appeare [that things] were truly before our eyes though they were not present” (other accounts of demonstratio concur with his). That mutual emphasis on realism and immediacy clearly indicates the equivalence between compositio loci and demonstratio, but Ignatius’ remarks of course imply as well that the first prelude in a meditation will form an affective image solely of a sacred moment or spiritual truth. … the aesthetic of Ignatian meditation has obvious affinities with the aesthetic common to Counter-Reformation poetic theory and emblematics. (32)

St Ignatius’ remarks on the second prelude affirm what has just been observed of the first. He says that one should ask God for emotions in keeping with the meditation’s “subject matter” for emotions in keeping with the preceding compositio loci: “[I]f the contemplation is on the Resurrection I shall ask for joy…, if it is on the passion, I shall ask for pain, tears, and suffering with Christ” (p. 54; cf. especially p. 93). (32)

…the procedure is of course shaped directly by the imagination or phantasia. St Augustine describes the phantasia as having a dangerous instability and seductive vividness (De Trinitate 11,10,17; 12, 8,13-9, 14). However, concentrating it upon the sacred in composition of place, St Ignatius seeks to sanctify and control that mercurial faculty: for the length of a meditation the phantasia is organized into aiding the soul’s quest for God. (33)

The role of compositio loci in Ignatian meditation would seem, then, to be more subtle and important than has been generally allowed. The remainder of a meditation can in fact be seen as elaborating upon those spiritual and aesthetic themes initiated with the first of the preludes. That can be seen at once in what Ignatius says of the middle section of a meditation, which usually takes one of two forms, the first being a comprehensive and emotionally affecting analysis, or distributio,… [M]y understanding is to be used to reason more in detail on the subject matter, and thereby move more deeply my affections through the use of the will” (p.55). The second form which the middle section of a meditation can take is that of an analysis where different aspects of the sacred topic are related to the senses. That “application of the senses” uses the power of the imagination rather as it is used in composition of place. For instance, in a meditation on hell one is advised to analyze the nature of hell and “see in imagination the great fires,… hear the wailing, the screaming,… [33] so the phantasia again aids the soul’s ascent. The affective intent and, to a degree, method of the preludes persist. (34)

The Augustinian pattern of a meditation is completed and its affective intent brought to a climax in what follows—the colloquy. There, in intimate address (usually to God alone) one turns the will to God in deep, yet ordered, love: “The colloquy is made properly by speaking as one friend speaks to another, or as a servant speaks to his master…” (p. 56; cf. p. 92). The experience is often to be intensified, according to St Ignatius, through dramatic use of the imagination: “Imagine Christ our Lord before you, hanging upon the cross. Speak with him…” (p. 56) (34)

Given the strong Jesuit influence among the Catholic religious poets, much less need be said here of St Francis de Sales’s Introduction to the Devout Life (1609) than of St Ignatius’ Exercises. And there is another good reason for that. … it is none the less clear that St Francis’s thinking on meditation—to isolate that subject—owes much to St Ignatius. (36)

The structure of “Salesian” meditation immediately suggests St Francis’s indebtedness to his predecessor, that structure comprising (pp. 44-45): preparation (putting oneself, as it were, in God’s presence and asking for inspiration); specific topic for meditation); affections and resolutions (the emotional [36] emotional and intellectual results of the previous analyses); conclusion (turning the will to God in colloquy) and prayers. Here can be discerned a reworking of the Ignatian pattern already examined: prayers at the start as well as at the close; preludes, analysis, and colloquy in between. (37)

Salesian meditation departs, however, from its original in this striking way: it is fashioned for those who live much amidst the business and bustle of the world (p.28)—hence its flexibility (not that Ignatian meditation can’t be accommodating) and its refusals to make unnecessary demands upon the contemplative (37)

In his poems St Robert Southwell sets before the reader a comprehensive spiritual discipline, wherein one must especially consider two choices: that between an egocentric and a theocentric life; that between a self able to be expressed in merely human terms and a self which can find no expression without the Word. (38)

His poems are at once profoundly devout and aesthetically self-conscious; at their best, as in “The burning Babe” and Saint Peters Complaint, they have a sophistication and subtle inwardness that suggest why as demanding a critic as Jonson could praise Southwell so highly. (38)

Sometimes he expresses his paradoxes in elaborate conceits meant not merely to evoke wonder but to dazzle with the marvelous, as where the slaughter of the Innocents is revealed [39] as the grotesque, the horrible, transformed to glory and triumph because indirectly in God’s service. Of the martyred children Southwell writes, “With open throats and silent mouthes you sing / His praise whom age permits you not to name…” (10, 15-16). But the frequent plainness, even at times the homeliness, of Southwell’s writing suggests that notions of apprehension through paradox, of meraviglia, and of stupore are accompanied by the idea of accommodating divine truths to the reader. Even a glance at how Southwell had his speaker narrate (e.g. 1, 1-6; 7, 13-18), expound (e.g. 1, 13-18; 4, 1-6), and celebrate (e.g. 3, 1-6; 14, 1-6) those truths indicates that The Sequence is pervaded by his desire for their plain, as well as their arresting, expression. (40)

If there he draws on an aesthetic unfamiliar in contemporary English religious verse in order to impress the truths of divine love on his readers, he also draws on it there to explore how beyond reason, how incomprehensible in its intensity (cf. ll, 13-14), and how terrible, as well as beautiful, is the agape manifested in Christ. The stylistic contrasts in “The burning Babe” express an astute interplay of the native with the Counter-Reformation. (47)

[Poems of wisdom— Poems of repentence] Southwell’s poems of wisdom advise how one must act to hold to a God-centered existence, to keep within a God-centered universe. His poems of repentance consider what it means to place self at the heart of things, and focus on the abandonment of that folly; in other words (as “God is love”), they study the rejection of divine love and the subsequent awareness that one cannot endure separation from it. Through the poems of both groups Southwell confronts the reader with the same choices and possibilities as he does in the poems of agape and accommodation. Here, however, he writes with an even broader aesthetic and stylistic range in order to do so. /

The wisdom poems have much in common. They are almost always in the mid-centjry plain style of Gascoigne, Googe, and their peers—hence they tend to be descended from the medieval lyric of moral analysis and counsel, instances of which include Chaucer’s “Balade de Bon Conseil,” the anonymous “Alas! deceite that in truste is nowe,” and thereafter poems by Thomas More. In keeping with that, they tend to seem relatively emotionless and to be impersonally declared—as it were—rather than spoken by an individualized persona. (53)

Southwell’s studies of repentance stress the extent and power of divine mercy; they are poems which, though certainly making use of English devotional and literary traditions, can also strikingly exemplify those of the Counter-Reformation. An apt instance is “Saint Peters Complaynte” (the earlier and shorter of the two works bearing that name). It seems to develop from poems such as More’s “A rueful lamentacion…” or such as are familiar from A Mirror for Magistrates: elaborate and monitory laments at personal misfortune. Yet if it is akin to them it is, even so, informed by strategies that one would associate rather with the poetic theories of Pontanus and his successors. The poem’s third stanza well illustrates its stule and introduces its preoccupations: /

If tyrans bloodly thretts had me dismay’d:
Or smart of cruell torments made me yelde,
There had bene some pretence to be afray’de,
I should have fought before I lost the feilde.
But o infamous foyle: a maydens breathe
Did blowe me downe, and blast my soule to death. (11. 13-18) /

The grand manner of the verse suits the gravity of its matter and gives a violent immediacy to St St Peter’s almost incredulous self-analysis. More to the point, the declamatory and elaborately schematic rhetoric of that grand manner (see. 11. 13-16) suggests the English origins of Southwell’s poem. Yet on the other hand the strange conceits of the final couplet (“breathe,” “blowe me,” “blast my soule”—punning interplays of transmutatio, dementiens, and abusio) have affinities with Counter-Reformation poetics and aesthetics. In their curious and forceful physicality the conceits look toward the poetics of Pontanus; in their wittily unusual logic they anticipate the poetics of Gracian and of Tesauro. Southwell uses them to fashion a grotesque and psychologically appropriate image in which he depicts the terrible, the marvelous. Within the third stanza, as throughout the poem, Southwell cunningly brings together the native and the alien. (57)

In exploring the experience and rejection of evil, only “Davids Peccavi”—among the shorter poems of repentance—rivals the complexity of “Saint Peters Complaynte.” Southwell unfolds David’s lament with a deft and cunning plainness; as can be seen at once, the poem is very English in style and has virtually nothing in it of Counter-Reformation poetics. /

In eaves, sole Sparrowe sits not more alone,
Nor mourning Pellican in Desert wilde:
Then silly I, that solitarie mone,
From highest hopes to hardest hap exilde:
Sometimes ([o] blisful time) was virtues meede,
Ayme to my thoughts, guide to my word and deede. (11. 1-6) (58)

Saint Peters Complaint should not be seen merely as amplifying its brief counterpart, but as interweaving with great sophistication the concerns and strategies of virtually all Southwell’s other verse. The poem considers the dialectic between egocentrism and theocentrism, between self-love and agape; it examines both the manifesting of God’s selfless love and communication with God; it focuses minutely on the experience [61] and repudiation of evil, revealing the necessity of faith in God’s capacity to forgive and power to reconcile. Consonant with the scope and complexity of the poem’s concerns are its extraordinary range and subtlety of style. One could thus reasonably suggest that the poem relates to Southwell’s other verse much as Upon Appleton House does to Marvell’s other verse prior to 1654. Yet for all the attractions of that comparison, not least among which are its ironies, another made for some different reasons is more illuminating; as will be argued below, a doubly closer analogue to Saint Peters Complaint can be seen in Ralegh’s Ocean to Scinthia. At the moment, however, one might propose at least this: to associate Southwell’s poem with Marvell’s and Ralegh’s is to indicate something of the status which it merits, but has never been granted. (62)

Saint Peters Complaynte encompasses the concerns of nearly all Southwell’s other poems, and in it the intermingling of native with Counter-Reformation devotional and literary traditions, so recurrent in his verse, is subtle indeed. How the concerns of his other poems are present in Saint Peters Complaint has been discussed in some detail above; now a few remarks may perhaps further clarify the nature of its diverse style and hence its achievement as a whole. A predominantly, if not exclusively, English grand manner pervades much of the poem. (Nonetheless, in harmony with Cicero’s and with St [69] Augustine’s ideas on rhetorical mastery, it ranges from lofty to ornate to plain speech. Some of the ornate and all of the plain are native in manner.) A significant portion of the poem is, however, textured by images—conceits, emblems, compositions of place—born of the Counter-Reformation. What results is a thematically and psychologically intricate poem which forms at once a monument to the writings of Southwell’s Tudor predecessors and a substantial introduction of the devout aspect of the baroque into Tudor poetry (an introduction buttressed by works such as The Sequence, “The burning Babe,” and so on). What results is, in other words, one of the greatest English religious poems of the sixteenth century. (69-70)

Only two of Southwell’s Catholic contemporaries could approach his sophistication and insight as a religious poet. Henry Constable wrote his Spirituall Sonnettes after 1589, though exactly when is not known; the Divine Meditations of William Alabaster were written between 1596 and 1598. Constable’s Spirituall Sonnettes proclaim and celebrate tenets of the Church. Often, as they put forward Church teaching, they form or end as prayers for spiritual renewal. Their main—though by no means their only—achievement is that in doing though by no means their only—achievement is that in doing so they shrewdly depict an abandonment of profane for sacred eros, wherein courtiership and the male experience of desire (preoccupations in Constable’s secular verse) are redefined, and wherein many of the values (if not all the ideas or the rhetorical norms) in his secular verse are denied. It is remarkable norms) in his secular verse are denied. It is remarkable, moreover, that although the Spirituall Sonnettes clearly bear the doctrinal impress of the Council of Trent, they are otherwise virtually independent of the Counter-Reformation. Alabaster’s poems are less concerned than Constable with putting forward Church teaching, but they, too, strongly reveal the doctrinal influence of Trent. Furthermore, whilst his poems have natively English elements of style, as do those of Constable, they are also diversely related in style to the devotional literary traditions of the Counter-Reformation. (73)

Neither Constable nor Alabaster could be called a major poet, yet each wrote some discerning, stylistically astute, and moving poems. (73)

Constable… No less typical is the interaction of styles in the sonnet. In it the persona rises at one point from plainness to ornateness: where he aptly conveys an idea from the love lore of courtly neoplatonism in a style resembling that of courtly love verse (1.8—religious sonnets). The dramatic change illustrates, in part, not only the various styles within the Spirituall Sonnettes—and the dominance of the plain style—but also the astuteness with which they are interwoven, for it suggests the frequent connection in the poems between shifts in style and the transferring (as well as transforming) of concepts. (75)

Unlike the religious verse of Constable, that of Alabaster not only reflects the doctrinal influence of Trent but also shows distinct affinities with the devotional literary traditions of the Counter-Reformation. That is not to deny his poems’ connection with the medieval religious lyric, particularly through their use of typology, or their drawing of the Petrarchan psychology and rhetoric of contemporary love verse (especially as, like Constable, he diverts the sonnet form from secular to devout purposes). Nor is it to underplay the significance of the plain style or of the strong-lined style in his poems, but it is to suggest their frequent harmony with Counter-Reformation poetics and emblematics, their frequent use of meditative strategies that are either Ignatian or in accord with Ignatian thought. (85)

The five sonnets just considered represent heightened, and at times violent, religious emotions in language which is elaborately conceited, dramatic, and insistently sensuous. In doing so they reveal intriguing harmonies with the Counter-Reformation baroque. To begin with, as meditations the sonnets unfold their spiritual dramas through strategies that are perhaps indebted (given that Alabaster read The Spiritual Exercises), but certainly akin, to those of Ignatian meditation: each poem employs what St Ignatius would have recognized as composition of place, analysis, and colloquy. But if those strategies are familiar from The Spiritual Exercises onwards, Alabaster’s use of them is not quite conventionally Ignatian. He uses strikingly realized emblems (the crucifix, the blood and water from Christ’s side, the grapevine, the vine of ivy or honeysuckle) as compositions of place; as might be expected, analysis in the meditations becomes the persona’s explication of the emblems or applications of them to his experience. To have emblems function as compositions of place, and be subsequently analyzed, is unusual neither is The Spiritual Exercises nor in works by Ignatius’s successors. Much less usual, however, is having meditations closely related to or on the Ignatian model open and continue in colloquy, for according to Ignatian convention the colloquy concludes a mediation. Alabaster begins beach of his sonnets with the persona talking to himself or to someone else, and so the sonnets continue, their [92] colloquies changing rhetorical forms: Alabaster draws on obsecratio, adhortatio, praeparatio, Constantia, aversio, optatio, ominatio, interrogatio. Hence his unconventional (by Ignatian standards) use of colloquy constantly adds to, and broadly shapes, the spiritual dramas unfolding in the poems. The details of those dramas he of course presents through the emblems and their dependent tropes. And if his using emblem to effect composition of place and analysis is not unusual, his emblems themselves sometimes are. Alabaster can not only develop his emblems imaginatively (if still conventionally), as when he makes the crucifix the immediate focus of meditation on psychological, as well as physical, reception of the stigmata (“Upon the Crucifix (I)”), but startlingly recreate them, as when he makes the grapevine come to suggest both the concept and the experience of paradise regained (“Ego Sum Vitis”). Finally, one might suggest that the physically affective and elaborate tropes through which he develops and sometimes puts forward his emblems (and which indicate—more than anything else in the poems—the emotional and intellectual fervour arising from the sensuous apprehension of Christ in purgative or illuminative experience) imply that his sonnets have connections not only with Jesuit meditative technique but, in their more local strategies, with Jesuit poetics. (93)

Of the Catholic religious poets writing before Crashaw in Stuart times, the most interesting are Sir John Beaumont, essentially a Jacobean author, and William Habington, Crashaw’s near contemporary and a cavalier. Beaumont wrote devout lyrics whose lucid design and plainness of style suggest the influence both of the Christian traditions of plain speaking and of Ben Jonson. His lyrics differ widely in achievement: the majority of them could not be called impressive, but the best celebrate God and analyze spiritual issueswith an epigrammatic, graceful, and sophisticated wit. It is manly as a lyricist that Beaumont is now remembered, yet in fact he aspired beyond that poetic role. He also wrote a sacred epic, The Crowne of Thornes, which unfolds a Christocentric vision of the universe. Like most of his lyrics, that more ambitious work is very markedly uneven; one of its intriguing aspects is, however, that (in contrast to the native Englishness of his short poems) its style is frequently baroque, suggesting the influence of the Counter-Reformation. In particular, the work reveals an indebtedness to, or at the least distinct affinities with, Ignatian meditative technique. When uniting the meditation and the grand manner, Beaumont’s epic can become spectacularly baroque. Unlike Beaumont’s religious verse, that of Habington consists of lyrics and verse epistle. Habington may have lacked Beaumont’s aspiration to epic, but certainly as a maker of short poems he is Beaumont’s superior, writing more evenly and, at times, with greater intellectual and stylistic astuteness. His verse sometimes resembles that of Donne’s satires, epistles, and elegies, but at others appears closer to that of his fellow cavaliers. It is also verse whose thematic range is narrow—much more so than that of Beaumont’s verse: contemptus hominis and contemptus mundi are its preoccupations. (102-3)

As was suggested earlier, Beaumont’s The Crowne of Thornes unfolds a Christocentric vision of the universe (see Book 5, passim) in a style that is frequently, and sometimes resplendently, baroque. (107)

He then considers the torturing of Christ prior to the Crucifixion: /
Now like a prince, who by the peoples choice
Is rais’d to regall state, whom euery voice
Applauds, while he in kingly garments deckt,
Doth sitting in this throne the crowne expect,
Our Sauior sits, when straight his hatefull foes
With platted thornes his sacred brows enclose;
And that they may more deeplely pierce his briane,
With all their force this flowing wine-presse straine.
These fixed points, the more his head they wound,
The more they shew his kingdome’s stedfest ground.
The strength that rests in their enraged armes
Seemes not enough for those desertlesse harmes;
But they strong instruments and engines take
To wrest the Crowne, and it more straight to make.
Hence flow the streames which neuer shall be dry,
Which still with Abdel’s blood for vengeance cry:
And like the teares which wronged widdowes spend
Fall on the cheeke, and thence to heauen ascend.
O bruised head, the horrour of whose paines,
Like death’s cold finger, gripes my stopped veines.
O swelling eyes, whose strain’d and bloody teares
Enforce my eye-balls to forsake their spheares,
Because this starre is dim’d with bloody streames,
Who to the blind hath giuen lightsome beames.
If hot reflections which the sunne doth yield,
When it beats strongly on a brazen shield
Makes blind Democritus, who loathes to see
The good in paines, the bad in high degree,
And thus his mind from sensuall obiects brings
To contemplation of more noble things,
How can my… eyes maintaine their sight
And not turne darke, drown’d with deuotions light,
That they this dismall obiect may auoide,
Were worthless spite high vertue hath annoy’d.
As Gorgon’s head to senseless stones hath chang’d
The greedy gazers, so my soule estrang’d
From liuely sense growes dull with woe’s excesse,
When she perceiues how deadly stings oppresse
And compasse round, like snakes with poysonous griefe,
That glorious head, which of all heads is chiefe,
Which both in course of nature and of grace
Hath ouer vs his members highest place:
Whose noble vigour vitall spirit brings
To dyeing limbs, whence ioyfull motion springs. (11. 508-551)

For all that, Beaumont’s fusion of the high style and the meditation in The Crowne of Thornes creates some of his poem’s more memorable—in fact, more impressively baroque—moments. (113)

The baroque icon thus presented is hardly as brilliant as the account of Christ’s crowning or as the climax to the narrator’s meditative prayer, but it does suggest how shrewdly Beaumont could write in a baroque style to confront the reader with compelling images of his main concerns. If, as a Catholic religious poet, Beaumont is now remembered for having penned some elegant lyrics, he should also be remembered for having been the only Catholic religious poet in the English Renaissance to have significantly attempted a sacred—and recurrently baroque—epic in his native language, some moments of that work being memorable and, arguably, better than the best of his short poems. (115)

Crashaw’s religious verse is dominated by study of the love descending form God to man, of that reaching from man to God, and of those loves’ intermingling. His poems’ pervasive studying of sacred love is characterized by several concerns. He focuses often on illuminative and on unitive experience, more often than do any of the other Catholic poets (with the possible exception of Beaumont). He examines how sacred love transforms human perception and identity, how it perfects or transcends human reason; he presents it as transforming, extending, traditional modes of religious discourse. In so considering sacred love, then, his poems emphasize its intensity, generosity—and wit (“O wit of loue!”). (127)

His English poems as a whole, for all their frequent and ardent celebrating of female saints, are undoubtedly Christocentric. (127)

The Hymn [to Jesus’s name] opens with topoi of humility (see especially 11. 1-2, 1. 6), Crashaw’s speaker beginning to celebrate the Name, but at the same time acknowledging his innate unworthiness, and inability, to do so. (128)

St Francis de Sales… in a letter to the Baronne de Chantal: /
‘I am so hard pressed that the only ting I have time to write to you is the great word of our salvation: JESUS. O, my daughter, if we could only for once really say this sacred name from our heart! What sweet balm would spread to all the powers of our spirit! …’ [Dated 1 January 1608. Crashaw may have been acquainted with the saint’s letters. See: St Francis de Sales, Selected Letters, trans. Elizabeth Stopp (London, 1960), no. 34, p. 144. Cf. St Francis de Sales, The Treatise of the Love of God, 1, pp. 304-306) /
Whilst the paraphrase suggests, then, illuminative tranquility, the hymn on the Holy Name suggests a fervent illumination looking toward unitive ecstasy—those seeming to be the most recurrently imaged aspects of that level of mystical experience. /
Reference to the same Counter-Reformation saints helps to elucidate the nature of the unitive experience as it is depicted in the hymn and elsewhere by Crashw. In the letter from St Francis de Sales which was just cited, the saint describes unitive experience in these passionate terms: “O, my daughter, if we could only for once really say this sacred name from our heart! What [141] sweet balm would spread to all the powers of our spirit! How happy we should be, my daughter, to have only Jesus in our understanding, Jesus in our memory, Jesus in our will, Jesus in our imagination! Jesus would be everywhere in us, and we should be all in him.” St Francis’ ardent, exclamatory and, at one point, richly sensuous description of utter unity with Christ concisely (if not of course completely) characterizes the desire for unitive experience that pervades the climax of the hymn (lines 159-196; cf, 120-126). But another form or phase of unitive experience is pictured in the conclusion to the hymn of “Divine union”: “The soul that has experienced… union …. Is left so full of courage that it would be greatly comforted if at that moment, for God’s sake, it could be hacked to pieces. It is then that it makes heroic resolutions and promises, that its desires become full of vigour…” Using terms similar to Crashaw’s yet more comprehensive than his (for his are historically specific), St Teresa makes explicit what he chooses rather to imply: that union is a source of transcendently heroic virtue. As the hymn represents unitive experience, so Crashaw’s other poems depict it. (142)

First, Crashaw’s literary relations with the Counter-Reformation are diverse and cannot be restrictively described. Finally, since the Counter-Reformation does not provide the only stylistic models for his religious verse, the use that he makes of others—such as the medieval religious lyric and Herbert’s poems—has to be considered too. (151)

Perhaps the best way to begin is by considering Crashaw’s youthful paraphrase of psalm 23 and then his later “Charitas Nimia”. “Psalme 23” clearly indicates major continuities of style in Crashaw’s sacred verse. There he interplays a Christina plainness—and the influence of his father—with some catachrestic, sensuous conceits (see, for example, lines 13-15) and moments of ecstatic exclamation (line 1, lines 55-56). Thus the poem suggests that (presumably) long before he became a Catholic, Crashaw had a marked interest in elements of style which were, as he could hardly not have know, prominent in Counter-Reformation writings. The elaborate, vividly sensuous conceits and tendency to fervent exclamation which pervade his subsequent work can be seen initially in the paraphrase, whose plain style he would thereafter all but forsake and central tenets of whose Eucharistic theology he would [151] come to abandon. (151-2)

“Charitas Nimia” … Lord, what is man? Why should he coste thee
So dear? What has his ruin lost thee?
Lord, what is man? That thou hast ouerbought
So much a thing of nought?
/
Loue is too kind, I see; & can
Make but a simple merchant man.
‘Twas for such sorry merchandise
Bold Painters haue putt out his Eyes. (Lines 1-8)
/
The rhythms, imagery, and tone of the poem (especially in lines 5-6) unmistakably bear the impress of Herbert; Crashaw carefully recreates his predecessor’s mingling of Christian plainness with strong lines (in which dramatically plain speech is often, in any case, an element). … Nonetheless, if Herbert’s verse offered Crashaw models of style that he clearly found attractive throughout his literary career—as the publication date of “Charitas Nimia” suggests—those models seem to have strongly influenced almost none of his important poems; they were, moreover, increasingly supplanted in his favour by Counter-Reformation models of style… (151-2)

…the variety and subtlety of his religious poems’ baroque strategies—used to represent, for the most part, the diversity and the nuances of spiritual illumination or union, and of sacred love’s transforming power—invite further discussion. (153)

Yet once more, “Psalme 23” seems the place to begin. In describing and celebrating the experience of illumination, Crashaw’s speaker says: /
At my feet the blubb’ring Mountaine
Weeping, melts into a Fountaine,
Whose soft silver-sweating streames
Make high Noone forget his beames… (lines 13-16)
/
There, as sometimes elsewhere in the poem, the speaker images illumination in terms not merely pastoral, but luxuriantly pastoral. He does not, however, suggest only in doing so that sacred love (cf. lines 3-4) has radically transformed the conditions of his soul’s existence. He traces an elaborately sensuous process of transformation (the mountain’s metamorphosis into a fountain) to suggest sacred love’s radical transformation of his illumined soul’s perceptions. In accord with the poetic theory and practice of the Counter-Reformation, Crashaw fashions vividly physical and extreme conceits (conformatio and audacia) to make transcendent spiritual experience sensuously apprehensible—and to convey the wonder of it. (153)

Hymn on the name of Jesus…
Lo, where Aloft it comes! It comes, Among
The Conduct of Adoring SPIRITS, that throng
Like diligent Bees, And swarm about it.
O they are wise;
And know what SWEETS are suck’t from out it.
It is the Hiue,
By which they thriue,
Where All their Hoard of Hony lyes. (lines 151-158)
…
Their main strategy is the conceit, and their conceits function much as do those lines 13-16 of “Psalme 23”: they seek to make transcendent spiritual experience intelligible in sensuously affective terms (see especially lines 155), and to communicate the marvelousness of it. … Yet if lines 151-158 of the hymn suggest continuities between the baroque strategies of that poem and those of the earlier paraphrase, a subsequent passage tends rather to emphasize discontinuities. (154)

SWEET NAME, in Thy each Syllable
A Thousand Blest ARABIAS dwell;
A Thousand Hills of Frankincense;
Mountains of myrrh, & Beds of spices,
And ten Thousand PARADISES
The soul that tasts thee takes from thence.
How many vnknown WORLDS there are
Of Comforts, which Thou hast in keeping! (lines 183-190) /

Like the preceding passage, this one is dominated by sensuously affective conceits that seek to communicate the wonder of spiritual union. The main stylistic difference between the two would seem to be that here Crashaw fashions his conceits both to mediate the divine to the human—and to intimate the tremendous strain placed on language in that role. In attempting to suggest experience of the infinite, of the Name of the Word, in human words, Crashaw’s speaker gestures rather than depicts. His conceits imply the visual, yet defy visualization. … Those extravagant and luxuriant conceits reveal, that is to say, the inexpressibility topos as implicit in the speaker’s attempt at representing unitive ecstasy. Implicitly connecting affective conceits with that topos is a strategy recurrent in Crashaw’s developed baroque style, which means [155] (among other things) that his Counter-Reformation artistry sometimes both represents the divine and indirectly acknowledges its own, as well as all human words’, unavoidable failure to do so adequately. (155-6)

…one can further illustrate the rich diversity of Crashaw’s baroque strategies and, in doing so, consider particularly how he seeks to use musicality in relation to a larger form, by returning to “Luke 2, Quaerit Jesum…” [156] … ‘Dawne then to me, thou morne of mine owne day … (line 45) / Perhaps the most interesting feature of those lines, however, is that they illustrate the subtlety with which Crashaw can connect the conceit and the emblem, connection of the two being a more recurrent strategy in his religious verse than the linking of the conceit to the inexpressibility topos. At some points in his religious verse Crashaw displays emblems directly… at others, he rather alludes to emblems through one or more conceits. Here, through the conceit of the “sunnes” (line 34) and that of the “morne” (line 45), he does not directly present but cunningly alludes to the emblem of Christ as the Sun of Righteousness (cf. lines 35-6). … Although Crashaw’s linking of the affective conceit and the emblem is one of the more important baroque strategies in his religious verse, and although he uses it at the climax of “Luke 2”, it apparently occurs only once and is an indirect presence, in the poem. A strategy (other than that of the conceit itself) which both openly pervades the lyric and which Crashaw develops astutely form the start as an element of the lyric’s design is the creation of musical effects. The suggestion was made earlier that “Luke 2” approximates to the form of a deliberative oration, and that it does so not to reveal the Virgin’s lament for her son as coherently reasoned but to emphasize instead the failure of her reason to understand the Christ child. Against the unfolding failure of reason in the poem, Crashaw plays an elaborately patterned musicality, using the affective power of music to amplify the Virgin’s expression of grief and to arouse the reader’s sympathy with—to make the reader share in—her extreme emotion: to contribute, that is to say, to the poem’s implicit privileging of sacred love over human rationality. The following lines well illustrate the poem’s intricate harmony of repetitions and contrasts, its finely controlled modulation of cadence and of tone: /

And is he gone, whom these armes held but now?
Their hope, their vow?
Did ever greife, & joy in one poore hear
Soe soone change part?
Hee’s gone. The fair’st flower, that e’er bosomed rest,
My soules sweet rest.
My wombs chast pride is gone, my heau’en-born boy;
And where is joy?
Hee’s gone. & his lou’d steppes to wait upon,
My joy is gone.
My joyes, & hee are gone; my greife, & i
Alone must ly.
Hee’s gone. Not leaving with me, till he come,
One smile at home.
Oh come then. Bring thy mother her lost joy:
Oh come, sweet boy.
Make hast, & come, or e’er my greife, & i
Make hast, & dy. (lines 1-18) /

Through the elaborate musicality of his verse, Crashaw in effect makes the Virgin’s lament an aria at the same time as, by other means, he virtually (and perhaps consciously) makes it a deliberative oration. (159)

If his style at times reflects his admiration for Herbert, or suggests his interest in medieval religious poetry, Herbert’s influence on his important poems seems rare, and it is apparent that he tended not only to imitate but to recreate those aspects or instances of medieval religious verse that drew his pen to paper (as “Luke 2. Quaerit Jesum…”, “The Hymn of the Chvrch…”, “The Hymn of Sainte Thomas…”, and Sancta Maria Dolorvm notably attest.) (159)

Whilst each of Crashaw’s three poems concerned with St Teresa notably honours that saint, the greatest of them is [159] clearly A Hymn to the Name and Honor of the Admirable Saint Teresa…, a more complex and daring work than its companion pieces, and one which all but comprehends their achievements. (160)

Crashaw, in retelling the saint’s life, honours her by using it both to prove the centrality of sacred love to, and to study sacred love’s might transformation of, the human personality. (160)

[in the Hymn] here he seems distinctly to unite the religious song of praise with, in the first place, a variant of the deliberative form (the most notable change to the form being that here, as in the Virgin’s lament, confutatio precedes confirmatio). The poem begins with the resounding “Loue, thou art Absolute sole lord / Of LIFE & DEATH” (1-2), testamentum acting as propositio by way of exordium, then “[t]o proue the word” (line 2) proceeds to confutatio (liens 2-14, containing some narrative elements), wherein evidence is sought not from the ranks of “Ripe Men of Martyrdom” (line 5) but from—initially—the example of the infant Teresa. Thereupon the poem proceeds to confirmatio/narratio (lines 15-180), offering three icons of the saint, and finishes with acclamatio/conclusio (lines 181-182). Constantly heightening the persuasiveness of the poem’s deliberative form is an affective rhetoric… (160)

His fusion of the hymn, the deliberative oration, and the suasoria is, to begin with, a stroke of wit: Concordia discors. But the truly remarkable wit in his poem lies in his icons of Teresa. The incongruities of Teresa’s infant heroism are pictured in emotive paradoxes that bring together sublimity and pathos, fiery passion and delicacy—and in conceits whose daring befits depiction of the daring child (lines 25-28, lines 35-42, and so on). The mystical experiences of the adult Teresa (which Crashaw presents as the quintessence of her adult life) are imaged in intensely sensuous, cumulatively forceful conceits that untie the language of her autobiography with parody of the paradoxes and sexual word-play of Petrarchan love verse and that cunningly rise to a parody of sexual climax. Her apotheosis is pictured incandescently, in glittering images of the moon and the stars, of snow and fire, of gems, bright scars, and the white steps of the Lamb, and by paradoxes mingled with hyperbole. (167)

[Weeper] Thereupon he dramatically and climactically restates his perception of her as having become a totally new creation through her exemplary repentance (sts 15-18). Parodying the paradoxes of Petrarchan love verse, he indicates that as a new cosmos she is, like the other cosmos, a discordia concors; at the same time, however, he also indicates that her harmonious discord transcends it insofar as sacred love alone informs and orders her, resolving opposites into smooth amity: (171)

Although Crashaw’s study of St Mary Magdalen differs form his study of St Teresa in many ways, it is nonetheless, as was implied above, like that poem in the sophistication of its baroque style. The virtuosity with which Crashaw uses baroque strategies in the hymn to St Teresa has already been discussed; to examine, even briefly, how he does so in The Weeper will suggest why the stylistic achievements of the two poems can be equated. If, in the former, Crashaw cunningly mingles formal praise and formal argument, no less shrewd in the latter is his bringing together of the meditation and the epigram. Crashaw’s meditative structures in his religious verse cannot often be identified precisely with the patters of conventional meditative modes—as The Weeper illustrates. Perhaps, since the poem’s compositions of place/analyses, and also its temper, recall what St Francis de Sales observes of devout wit and of the temper of meditation in his Introduction to the Devout Life, one could identify its meditative structure as having affinities with the Salesian meditative mode. Be that as it may, fused with the meditative design of The Weeper is the epigram: each of the poem’s stanzas is an epigram; the speaker’s meditation evolves in sequences of epigrams. There lies the basis of Crashaw’s wit of love in the poem. Through the compacting of conceits in the epigrams, and the sudden juxtaposition of very diverse conceits as the epigrams succeed each other, he has his speaker, in meditating on Mary Magdalen’s contrition and her gift of tears, confront the reader with changing visions of her. What makes those changing visions stylistically remarkable is that they emphasize Crashaw’s protean use of the conceit. Almost all the conceits in the poem are sensuously affective, many being sensuously luxuriant. Many are flamboyantly paradoxical (as in sts 3 and 4); some are emblematic (as in sts 17-19); some are sacred parodies (see, for example, stst 15-16); many are scripturally allusive whilst others draw on classical myth (compare sts 21-22 and st. 25); some are conceptually intricate whereas some are fantastically playful (compare sts 19 and 5). One is reminded of Gracian’s remark that producing wit is “an exaltation of man’s mind that carries us to the summit of a strange fanciful hierarchy.” (174)

If, by drawing on devotional literary modes of the Counter-Reformation, Southwell in effect introduced the devout aspect of the baroque into the verse of the English Renaissance, Crashaw in his religious verse made its presence there more brilliant than did any of his Catholic predecessors or contemporaries. The startling sensuousness and intellectual intricacy, the prolific creation of the marvelous, in so many of his religious poems indicate the uniqueness of his baroque style at its finest. The sophistication of that style, one could fairly add, surpasses the sophistication achieved by any of the other Catholic religious poets in any style. But Crashaw can be claimed the greatest Catholic religious poet of the English Renaissance for a further reason: his poems study nearly all the spiritual concerns in the verse of his fellow Catholics with a subtlety that they did not often equal. That becomes clear when, for a start, one considers Crashaw’s poems in relation to Southwell’s. Crashaw’s poems suggest that whilst he shared Southwell’s interest in illumination and in unitive experience, he studied them with a frequency and an acuteness with which Southwell did not. His attention to the Eucharist, moreover, was closer than Southwell’s. (Their works seem equally Christocentric, for all that, and seemingly place similar emphases on the divine agape.) Crashaw focuses on the spiritual nuances of penitence and of grief perhaps no more perceptively than does Southwell, but his spiritual admonitions are often more complex than those of his Jesuit predecessor. His astute studies of female sanctity and religious experience do not have any real counterparts in Southwell’s verse. Such contrasts become rather more obvious when one sets Crashaw’s religious poems side by side with those of poets who were certainly not Southwell’s equals. Crashaw apparently shared Constable’s strong interest in female spirituality and in sacred eros, yet his examination of them is far more elaborate than Constable’s. Just so, he went beyond Alabaster in considering illumination, unitive experience, martyrdom, and almost everything else. One hardly need go on to make similar points by contrasting Crashaw’s religious poems with those of Beaumont and of Habington. It all but goes without saying that none of the other Catholic religious poets could rival him in the study of sacred love’s intensity and power to transform human life and art. Crashaw’s religious verse virutally sums up and perfects [175] the works of his Catholic fellows from Southwell onwards (among them, only he could be mentioned in the same breath with Herbert); it is with him that one necessarily ends a critical history of Catholic religious poetry’s major phase in the English Renaissance. (175-6)