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Structure and Symbol in Crashaw's Hymn in the Nativity
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 02 December 2020
Extract
In his successive revisions of the Hymn in the Nativity, Crashaw shows a growing sense of form, and the final version, posthumously published in 1652, has a conceptual unity that raises it to a level of poetry considerably above that of the 1646 version. He achieved this by substituting structural symbols for mere sense images, by emending a few lines, by dropping one stanza, and by adding two very important new stanzas that make the structural pattern of the poem much clearer. These changes had a considerable effect on the rest of the poem because they placed it in a new context. Miss Wallerstein, who notes the “steady pruning of the purely sensuous elements,” and who calls these additional stanzas “the great stanzas which transmute the whole,” describes the final version of the poem as one of Crashaw's “few perfectly realized poems.” A comparison of the text of 1646 with the texts of 1648 and 1652 enables us to study the poet in the process of this realization and to see how large a part clarification of structure played in it.
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- Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1948
References
1 The textual material in this paper is based on the edition of L. C. Martin (Oxford, 1927). He suggests (p. xlvi) that the 1646 text of Steps to the Temple, in which this poem first appeared, was set up from an incompletely revised MS of “fairly early origin.” Miss Wallerstein (Richard Crashaw, a Study in Style and Poetic Development, Univ. of Wisconsin Stud, in Lang, and Lit., No. 37, 1935, p. 52) suggests a date near 1637 for the original composition of the Hymn in the Nativity.
2 The effect of some of these changes on the metrics of the poem is outside the scope of this paper. See Miss Wallerstein (p. 40) for a treatment of the metrics.
3 Op. cit., pp. 52 and 10. Note, however, that the stanza she describes (p. 52) as “the most luxurious and purely sensuous” was not omitted in 1648 but in 1652. See Martin, p. 250, n. to line 90.
4 Most of the important changes were made before 1652. Of the thirty odd variations between the 1648 and the 1652 texts, the majority are of no conséquence and may be due to the limitations of a foreign compositor. Over half of them are misprints and most of the six possible corrections are in punctuation. Of the four differences that are of any significance for this paper, the first (line 32) is the substitution of a more appropriate word, the second (line 47) involves a change in meaning, the third is the omission of a stanza (see n. 3 above), and the fourth is in the punctuation of the last three stanzas, which are run together. We do not know whether these four changes were made by Crashaw or by Thomas Carre, who prepared the 1652 text for the press, but since these changes are all in the same direction as the more numerous and important ones that appeared in the 1648 text, and since Carre's Anagramme indicates an exceptionally close intellectual and spiritual sympathy between the two men, it seems safe to assume that “Car was Crashaw,” that is, that even if he was responsible for the actual changes, they were still in keeping with the wishes of the poet.
5 Although this poem was first published in 1646, it was remote in place from the Hymn in the Nativity.
6 For an exposition of this poem and an interesting comparison with the Hymn in the Nativity, see Austin Warren, Richard Crashaw (Louisiana State Univ. Press, 1939), pp. 147–151.
7 Both these traditions are from the Apocrypha.
8 The words baulmy Nest furnish a distinct problem in meaning in the different versions of the poem because of the change in context. In the 1646 version balmy refers back to the perfumes of the flowers and means fragrant. Although the emphasis in this stanza is en tirely on the light coming from the eyes of the Christ Child, baulmy Nest probably foreshadows the later resting place of the Infant twixt Mother's brests, since a fragrant breast was traditional with the love poets, and since this is the only possible nest the poem gives us; but this is not too clear and certainly not emphatic. In 1648–52 this choral stanza is repeated again immediately after the later passage. Furthermore the image of the Virgin as the Phoenix nest is introduced, and the whole concept of her breast as a suitable resting place for her Son is given a climactic development. In the later version, then, the words take on a clear and more important if not a different meaning. The possible modern association of balmy with warmth, as applied to the weather, hardly seems likely here because the earliest example of such usage given by the NED is from Pope in 1704. For a clear use of nest for the Virgin's breast see Crashaw's paraphrase of Stabat Mater in note 13 below. For his further use of the word see especially On the Name of Jesus, lines 11–12, 105–106, 119–120, 220–221, and New Year's Day, lines 19–20.
9 1648 has “Bright.” This change, which is not included when the stanza was repeated, brings the line in closer harmony with “new-bloom'd Cheek” added in 1648-52 to the last solo stanza. See below.
10 See St. John Damascene, Oratio I de Virg. Mariae Nativitatem (Migne, P. G., xcvi, 663) : “O par beatum Joachim et Anna! vobis omnis creatura obstricta est. Per vos enim donum omnium donorum prasstantissimum Creatori obtuUt, nempe castam matrem, quae sola Creatore digna erat.” This passage was included in the Fifth Lesson for Matins for the feast of St. Joachim, August 16. See the Roman Breviary.
11 The Great Commentary, tr. Thos. Mossman (4th ed., London, 1890), Commentary on St. Luke, p. 84.
12 For a convenient summary of the medieval Dionysian tradition in the Renaissance, see Batman upon Bartholomew (London, 1582), fols. 6-7; also the Calvinist John Diodati's Pious Annotations upon the Holy Bible (London, 1643), “The Booke of the Prophet Isaiah,” p. 6. For Crashaw's immediate environment, see Thomas Heywood's The Hiérarchie of the blessed Angels (London, 1635), a work dedicated to Henrietta Maria. Note especially the stanza on p. 620:
Great God imprint
The Seraphs loue into this Heart, scarce mine;
Once Flesh, now Flint:
Stirre up an heate
In this my frozen brest, by Pow'r Divine,
I thee entreate;
And never let thy Grace from me remoue,
Since Loue is God, and thou my God art Loue.
Note also Crashaw's further references to the Seraphim in the Hymn to St. Teresa, lines 91–96, and in The Flaming Heart, Unes 53-58. According to some of the exegetes, all of the angels came down to earth at the birth of Christ. See Cornelius a Lapide, op. cit., p. 85.
13 At the Uteral level it can only be said that she surpasses the cold purity of the snow and the possibly impure warmth of the Seraphim, or, in other words, she unites the required quality of each; but taken in its proper context of the traditional theology of the mystery Crashaw was celebrating, it is justifiable to say that the poem imphes and the Christian reader would understand that the Virgin Mother was superior to all created things either in heaven or on earth. See note 10 above. Snow is involved only in so far as it is a Uteral comparison, because as a symbol for a quality it is adequate to express the ultimate. Her superiority to the angels was traditional. See, for instance, Cornelius a Lapide, op. cit., Commentary on St. Matthew, r, 16: “Mary is the Mother of God, therefore she is far more excellent than all the angels, even the Cherubim and Seraphim.” Note also the invocation Queen of Angels from the Litany of Loretto where Crashaw was a canon. In his paraphrase of the Stabat Mater (Martin, p. 285, stanza v), Crashaw renders fons amoris as soft sourse of loue and continues further:
O in that brest Of thine (the noblest nest) Both of loue's fires & flouds)...
Crashaw here seems definitely to place Mary above the Seraphim in the fire of love. It should also be recalled here that in his Anagramme Carre says that Crashaw was called “chaplaine of the virgin mild.”
14 See note 8 above.
15 Since the important changes are clearly grouped, I give the earlier version only where the differences are significant.
16 See note 3 above.
17 These stanzas are first run together in a single unit in the 1652 text. The change is in keeping with the closeness of thought.