“Crashaw is quite alone in his peculiar kind of greatness.” —T. S. Eliot

If you came this way,
Taking any route, starting from anywhere,
At any time or at any season,
It would always be the same: you would have to put off
Sense and notion.

While deep in the bricolage stage of his final Quartet: Little Gidding, T.S. Eliot’s journeys to Little Gidding And says that he plans to “shed a few tears over Crashaw, Mary Collett, Nicholas Ferrar and John Inglesant.”  Little Gidding  is a tiny hamlet fifty kilometers north of Cambridge. It was founded in 1626 As an Anglican spiritual community by Nicholas Ferrar, who lost a fortune investing in the Virginia Company of London , he is also greatly responsible for the publication of George Herbert’s The temple after his death in 1633. Crashaw was educated at Charterhouse School and Pembroke College, Cambridge. After taking a degree, Crashaw taught as a fellow at Peterhouse, Cambridge, where he was teacher he then began to publish religious poetry that expressed a distinct mystical nature and an ardent Christian faith. Crashaw possibly knew Nicholas Ferrar in London; he certainly visited Little Gidding in the years after 1631, as a Cambridge student, and kept up his relationship with the community after Nicholas had died.

“Flamboyant, experimental, and cosmopolitan in his literary and religious preferences, Richard Crashaw (ca. 1613–1649) wrote exultant, high-flying verse that remains the most sustained effort in English to render ecstasy poetically. Routinely misunderstood and at times even maligned for his supposed bad taste, Crashaw mixes the languages of erotic and religious rapture in powerful poems about holy women such as Mary Magdalene, Teresa of Ávila, and the Virgin Mary, but also in lyrics about Christ’s naked, crucified body, making Crashaw one of the queerest of religious poets. ”

Quoted from a description of The English Poems of Richard Crashaw[ Edited by Richard Rambuss Published by: University of Minnesota Press 2013]

Crashaw, Richard (1612-1649)

Steps To The Temple, The Delights Of The Muses, And Carmen Deo Nostro. By Ric. Crashaw, sometimes Fellow of Pembroke Hall, and late Fellow of St Peters Colledge in Cambridge.

     Bound With

Richardi Crashawi Poemata et epigrammata, quæ scripsit Latina & Græca, dum Aulæ Pemb. alumnus fuit, et Collegii Petrensis socius.

[London]: In the Savoy, Printed by T.N. for Henry Herringman at the Blew Anchor in the Lower Walk of the New Exchange, 1670

   [ bound with ]

Cantabrigiae: Ex officina Joan Hayes, celeberrimæ academiæ typographi: 1670.   Price: $8,500

Octavo 16.5 x 10.5 cm. Signatures A-O⁸: A-F⁸ . This is the third edition (not the second, as the title states) of his “Steps to the Temple” (first 1646).  The third edition of “The Delights of the Muses” (first edition 1648)  The  second edition of the posthumous “Carmen Deo Nostro…Sacred Poems” (first edition 1652). BOUND With  The First edition of the “ Poemata et Epigrammata”  (in this volume there are ten Latin poems  reprinted from the 1646 & 1648 editions of the “Steps to the Temple”    

  This copy is beautifully complete, including the engraved frontispiece, and the final blank, O⁸. This is a lovely copy in very good contemporary condition. The original dark brown sheepskin has been expertly rebacked. The leaves are strikingly clean and white throughout. With the bookplate of Graham Pollard.     `

Steps to the Temple is generally recognized as one of the most important collections of metaphysical verse produced in the Restoration period. Crashaw’s “Hymm to St. Teresa” provided the inspiration for Coleridge’s “Christabel.” Crashaw shows his admiration for Herbert, throughout his poems, there are also many echoes of Donne.

“Compared with one another, Crashaw represents more of Donne’s ecstasy, and Herbert more of his reason.” (The Donne Tradition, George Williamson)

This volume contains Crashaw’s best known poems: “The Weeper,” “The Divine Epigrams,” “In memory of the Vertuous and Learned Lady Madre de Teresa,” and the much anthologized “Wishes To His (Supposed) Mistresse.”

Wither to Prior #234; Wing C-6838.   and 

Wither to Prior #236; Wing C6834;  Allison, A.F. Four metaphysical poets,; Crashaw [2]; Martin, L.C., Poems … of Crashaw,;

)()-()(

689G  George Herbert (1593-1633) & Christopher Harvey; 

The Temple. Sacred Poems and Private Ejaculations. By Mr. George Herbert, Late Oratour of the University of Cambridge. Together with his Life. with several Additions. Psal. 29. In his Temple doth every man speak of his honour. The Tenth Edition, with an Alphabetical Table for ready finding out the chief places. [bound with] The Synagogue: Or The Shadow Of The Temple. Sacred Poems, And Private Ejaculations. In Imitation of Mr. George Herbert. The Sixth Edition, Corrected and Enlarged.

London: Printed by W. Godbid, for R.S. and are to be Sold by John Williams Junior, in Cross-Key Court in Little-Britain, 1674. . price $ 4,500

Duodecimo , Signatures: π⁶ [*⁶](-[*1]) ,A- I¹² K⁶; ²A-C¹², A-B¹²,C⁶ {tricky but complete] Nineth edition of the first book, the second title is a Fifth edition. There were no editions published between 1709 -1799. This copy is bound in 20th century vellum over boards a nice copy.

From The Church Militant 

Religion stands on tiptoe in our land,
Ready to pass to the American strand.
When height of malice and prodigious lusts, Impudent sinning, witchcrafts, and distrusts
The marks of future bane—shall fill our cup
Unto the brim, and make our measure up ;
When Seine shall swallow Tiber, and the Thames, By letting in them both, pollutes her streams When Italy of us shall have her will,
And all her calendar of sins fulfil.
Whereby one may foretell what sins next year Shall both in France and England domineer Then shall Religion to America flee ;
They have their times of Gospel even as we. My God, Thou dost prepare for them a way, By carrying first their gold from them away ; For gold and grace did never yet agree ; Religion always sides with poverty.

The text of the Temple includes the pattern poems, “The Altar,” and “Easter Wings” Herbert’s reputation rests on this remarkable collection of poems which mark perfectly the metaphysical tone of his spiritual unrest, which is resolved in final peace, “the Herbert we know through ‘Aaron,’ ‘Discipline,’ ‘The Collar,’ ‘The Pulley,’ and many other poems in which he strives to subdue the willful or kindle the apathetic self His principal themes are those ‘two vast, spacious things Sinne and Love’ There is nothing soft in the poet who seeks to engrave divine love in steel; and a catalogue of gratuitous, untempered, and short-lived sweets leads up to the magnificent contrast of the disciplined soul that ‘never gives’

¶” As the Anglican merges with the greater poet, so the ‘quaint’ writer merges with the metaphysical Herbert had his share of the age’s passion for anagrams and the like, which Addison was to condemn as ‘false wit’ But the poet who could shape a poem in the physical likeness of ‘The Altar’ or ‘Easter Wings’ had, even more than most of his fellows, a functional sense of meter and rhythm. The technical experimentalist and master was, we remember, a skilled and devoted musician. The movement of his verse, taut or relaxed, can suggest all his fluctuating moods, from self-will or weakness to joyful surrender and assured strength. He moves from this world to the world of the spirit ‘As from one room t’another,’ or dwells simultaneously in both, and it is in keeping with that habit of mind, and with metaphysical origins in general, that many of his poems should be allegorical anecdotes, transfigured emblems. Apart from some of his fine dramatic openings, Herbert does not attempt the high pitch of Donne’s ‘Divine Poems’ . His great effects are all the greater for rising out of a homely, colloquial quietness of tone; and peace brings quiet endings- ‘So I did sit and eat;’ ‘And I reply’d, My Lord’ Though the friend and admirer of Donne (and of Bacon), Herbert did not cultivate scholastic or scientific imagery; mature and everyday life, the Bible and the liturgy were his chief sources The highest truth, as he said more than once, must be plainly dressed In spite of his classical learning and his Latin and Greek verse, he avoided the common surface classicism of the time Of the elements of a deeper classicism, if we care to use that name, he had muscular density, precision, deceptive simplicity, and a dynamic sense of form At times his structure may be a winding stair, but it is all built of seasoned timber” (D Bush, English Literature in the Earlier Seventeenth Century, pages 137-138).

Wing (2nd ed.), H1521, &, Wing H-1049; Palmer IV, 12.

You are not here to verify,
Instruct yourself, or inform curiosity
Or carry report. You are here to kneel
Where prayer has been valid. And prayer is more
Than an order of words, the conscious occupation
Of the praying mind, or the sound of the voice praying.
And what the dead had no speech for, when living,
They can tell you, being dead: the communication
Of the dead is tongued with fire beyond the language of the living.
Here, the intersection of the timeless moment
Is England and nowhere. Never and always.

from T. S. Eliot’s Little Gidding 1942