Crashaw’s Christmas poems

If any one tried to choose a Christmas anthology out or the English poets he would find it difficult to fill even a small book with good verses. Most poems about Christmas have more piety than poetry in them; yet the Nativity of Christ seems a subject made for poetry, and, in particular, is suited to the German side of our imagination, with its mixture of mystery and homeliness, its contrast of the manger and the visiting Kings of the East, of the shepherds lying among their flocks in the snow, and the midnight heavens opening above them to reveal a choir of angels singing tidings of great joy. The theme has been worthily treated in German music, and in earlier Italian art, but hardly in English poetry; for those of our poets whose genius would seem best fitted to treat it have strangely neglected it. Blake, for instance, the master of homely mystery, what a poem might he have written on the Nativity! Yet he has not left us a single carol. There is, indeed, one by a nameless author of the fifteenth century that Blake might have written:—

Me came all so still
Where his Mother was,
As dew in April
That falleth on the grass.

But hardly anything has been written since in this beautiful manner, and nothing by Blake. Indeed, when the Nativity has stirred the imaginations of our poets at all, it has stirred them in a different way. What good Christmas poetry we have is, most of it, stately and magnificent and, like Handel’s Messiah, concerned rather with the splendour and glorious promise of the Nativity, than with its mystery and pathetic strangeness. Milton’s Ode, for instance, is finest in the prophecy of a golden age to be, and in its exultation over the dethronement of pagan deities. The contrast between the Godhead and its surroundings is expressed in rather frigid and forced conceits. There is no tenderness for the Divine Child, no concern with the mystery of the Incarnation. Milton, in fact, though it seems a bold thing to say, had not a deep religious imagination. It was never the essential part of a sacred theme that inspired him, and his finest images illustrate not the nature but the accessories of Divinity. To him Heaven is music and multitudes of glittering forms. His imagination never dwells upon its spiritual side. He is the most complete Ritualist, for all his Puritanism, of all religious poets. So he thought of the Nativity as a most important event to be celebrated in high ceremonial verse, as if he were the Poet Laureate of Christianity, and in the same spirit in which Virgil celebrated the coming birth of the unknown Infant who was to transform the world. There was nothing dramatic to him in the Nativity, no human interest, no pathos or strangeness, and his imagination never seized upon the essence of the situation, as it was seized by the imagination of a contemporary poet in these two verses:—

That the great angel-blinding light should shrink
His blaze, to shine in a poor shepherd’s eye;
That the unmeasured God so low should sink,
As prisoner in a few poor rags to lie;
That from His Mother’s breast He milk should drink,
Who feeds with nectar Heaven’s fair family;
      That a vile manger His low bed should prove
      Who thunders on a throne of stars above;

That He whom the sun serves should faintly peep
Through clouds of infant flesh; that He, the old
Eternal Word, should be a child and weep;
That He who made the fire should fear the cold;
That Heaven’s high Majesty His court should keep
In a clay cottage by each blast controlled;
      That glory’s self should serve our griefs and fears,
      And free eternity submit to years.

These lines, unknown probably to many lovers of poetry, are by Richard Crashaw, the most neglected of our greater poets. For he is a great poet, and differs not in degree, but in kind, from the many writers of a narrow perfection far better known to us. A few of his inferior pieces are to be found in most anthologies. His best verses, like those just quoted, are usually to be found in formless and unequal poems, for his defects are as glaring as his merits are splendid, and he very seldom achieved a stately and connected whole. Yet there is a deeper reason than these defects to account for his neglect. The whole nature of his religious emotion is strange to the English mind. He became early in his short life a Roman Catholic, and wrote of sacred subjects rather like an Italian than an Englishman. He was influenced, too, by Italian literature. The “Sospetto d’Herode”, from which the verses quoted above are taken, is a free paraphrase of a poem by Marino. Many English poets of the sixteenth century were taken with fantastic Italian conceits, but none were carried into such extravagances as Crashaw. None certainly were, like him, filled with that peculiar Italian religious feeling that is distasteful to most Englishmen. It is our habit to draw a strict line between our religions and other emotions, whereas the Italians of Crashaw’s time found in their female saints a dangerous link between religion and erotics. In their religious art other passions sometimes seem to find a vent in pietistic ecstasy, and there is a taint of their sickly grossness in Crashaw’s poetry. Sometimes he seems to take too physical a delight in themes that we associate only with the austerity of spiritual beauty. But these lapses are not frequent, and it is their unfamiliarity that makes them so disagreeable to us. The great mass of his religious poetry is wholesome enough, though its splendours are remote from our interest. His imagination was not concerned with the practice of religion, but with dazzling images of the mysteries of faith, and with rapt expressions, almost pictorial in their vividness, of heavenly magnificence. He exults in images of the inscrutable glory of God. Like Correggio, he

                                  Loves to mass, in rifts
Of Heaven, his angel faces, orb on orb. . . .
Waiting to see some wonder momently
Grow out, stand full, fade slow against the sky.

His verse is thronged with celestial ardour, and with celestial music too. Yet, though a visionary poet, he is seldom vaporous. There is a certain definiteness in his images that gives substance to his most exalted raptures. Like most of the poets of his time, he loved “wit”, and would apply it to the most imaginative subjects, sometimes disastrously, sometimes with the most splendid results. Wit is concrete in its essence, and its function is to illustrate abstractions by a surprising and concrete example. Often enough Crashaw used examples altogether too concrete. Homeliness is incongruous to the nature of his mind and to the splendid texture of his verse, and when in imitation of Donne and Herbert he tries to be homely, he is often exquisitely absurd. But in his happier moments he is our greatest master of imaginative epigram. Then he combines all the dilating vastness of poetry with the happy surprises and precise application of an epigram. There could not be a better subject for imaginative wit than the Incarnation, and it was natural that Crashaw should rise to his greatest heights in writing of it. Indeed the line

And free Eternity submit to years

is, perhaps, the finest poetic epigram in the language. It is the most splendid example of a kind of inspired wit almost lost to us. In the eighteenth century there was wit enough, but little inspiration. In the nineteenth, plenty of inspiration, but little wit. Never since the seventeenth have the two been combined in that surprising union. There is less wit, but hardly less eloquence, in another verse in the “Sospetto d’Herode”.

He saw how, in that blest day-bearing night,
The Heaven-rebukéd shades made haste away;
How bright a dawn of angels with new light
Amazed the midnight world and made a day
Of which the morning know not; mad with spite,
He marked how the poor shepherds ran to pay
      Their simple tribute to the Babe, whose birth
      Was the great business both of Heaven and Earth.

One may note here how curiously the two and a half lines beginning “How bright a dawn of angels” anticipate the lyric accent of Shelley. There are other poems of Crashaw’s that anticipate yet more strangely the most elaborate effects of Mr Swinburne.

Crashaw wrote also, in a more lyrical and less weighty style, a Hymn of the Nativity, sung by shepherds, Thyrsis answering to Tityrus with a curious mixture of sacred and classical association that reminds one how the Italian painters were eager to seize any excuse, as in the frequent representations of St Sebastian, for imitating the antique in religious pictures. The poem, or course, is very artificial in form and contains some monstrous conceits. For this reason it is never likely to be popular. Half the verses, at least, one could wish away; but the rest have a swift lyrical beauty, a richness and lightness of sound, not heard in our poets before, and not to be heard again until the nineteenth century. Here is a verse, for instance, which both the shepherds sing:—

We saw Thee in thy balmy nest,
Young dawn of our eternal day;
We saw Thine eyes break from their East
And chase the trembling shades away.
We saw Thee and we blest the sight;
We saw Thee by Thine own sweet light.

Here is part of another sung by Tityrus:—

I saw the curled drops, soft and slow,
Come hovering o’er the place’s head;
Offering their whitest sheets of snow
To furnish the fair Infant’s bed.

To which Thyrsis makes a more splendid reply:—

I saw the obsequious Seraphim
Their rosy fleece of fire bestow;
For well they now can spare their wings,
Since Heaven itself lies here below.

Crashaw has written other poems on Christmas themes. There is one on the Circumcision – a subject that tempts him into some rather forced conceits, though they are all expressed with great beauty of rhythm. He wrote, too, “An Address to the Queen’s Majesty on Twelfth Day”, full of pompous and over-elaborate compliments with an almost blasphemous comparison between the royalties of the Queen and of the Infant Christ. Yet the opening is stately enough in all its exaggeration:—

‘Mongst those long rows of crowns that gild your race,
These royal sages sue for decent place;
The day-break of the nations; their first ray,
When the dark world dawned into Christian day,
And smiled i’ the Babe’s bright face, the purpling bud
And rosy dawn of the right royal blood.

But these verses ought, perhaps, to be placed among the curiosities rather than the beauties of literature, and still more ought the “Hymn as Sung by the Three Rings” for the Epiphany. It is an almost worthless poem of many pages, filled with one long-drawn comparison between the Infant Christ and the Sun. This is a comparison that Crashaw was never tired of, though it soon tires his readers. He is sometimes inclined to think that a religious poem requires no subject-matter except such comparisons. They prove the writer’s piety, and nothing else is needed. But that is enough of Crashaw’s faults. They are illustrated well enough in his Christmas poetry; and so are most of his merits, except, perhaps, the most remarkable of all, his extraordinary command of lyrical irregular verse. He was the first master of this and among the greatest that have ever practised it. In his hands it is an instrument on which every effect of majesty and swiftness of delicacy and grandeur can be produced at will. To prove this an extract must be taken, not from any of the Christmas pieces, but from the hymn to “The Name above every Name, the Name of Jesus”, the finest of all his poems. At the very beginning of it occurs the address to the Saints and Martyrs:—

The heirs elect of love; whose names belong
Unto the everlasting life of song,

the second line of which is unsurpassed for its union of largeness and propriety of expression. About the middle of the poem is the following passage:—

            May it be no wrong,
Blest heavens, to you and your superior song,
That we, dark sons of dust and sorrow,
            Awhile dare borrow
The Name of your delights and our desires
And fit it to so far inferior lyres.
Our murmurs have their music too,
Ye mighty orbs, as well as you;
            Nor yields the noblest nest
Of warbling Seraphim to the ears of love
A choicer lesson than the joyful breast
      Of one poor panting turtle-dove.

With which magnificent burst of varied music we commend Crashaw to the Christmas leisure of our readers.

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