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“The self-remembering soul sweetly recovers Her kindred with the stars, and meditates her immortal way Home to the original source of light and intellectual day.”
Richard Crashaw, baptized and raised a Protestant, died as a Catholic priest in the Italian town of Loreto. As we shall see, his early life and poetry indicate that those seeds that later gestated into both Catholicism and mysticism existed from the first.
Of the few facts we have about Crashaw's life, the two crucial factors in his childhood were the influence of his Puritan father and the absence of his mother.
The poet's learned father, William Crashaw, comes down to us as the staunch Puritan who zealously opposed both the Papery and the Jesuits. He seems to have hated Rome to such an extent that one is justified in concluding with Austin Warren that he betrays an hysterical fear of that ancient religion. “This force insidious and menacing,” Warren writes,” can scarcely have failed to excite the son's concern with the character and claims of a power which, if not diabolic, might indeed be divine.”1 The elder Crashaw's son later committed himself to everything that his father most hated and feared.
All that we know of Crashaw's mother is that her name was Helen, that her son was born either in 1612 or 1613, and that she died while he was still an infant. In 1619, William Crashaw married again. This second mother, named Elizabeth, died eight years later in childbirth. The single reference concerning her testifies to kindness toward her stepson.2
When Crashaw was about fourteen, his father also died,