Richard Crashaw's Poetry: The Imagery of Bleeding Wounds

George Walton Williams urges that readers must abandon themselves to a “willful oblivescence” to the “face value” of Crashaw's images to appreciate the force of his poetry.1 Another critic, pursuing this line of thought has suggested that a full appreciation of Crashaw's work requires an imaginative assent to the hypnotic force of his image patterns, that his work is ritual, and that the potency of his symbolism is, perhaps, not consciously understood by the poet himself.2 Thus, Crashaw's poetry would seem to make pressing demands on the reader. Yet, does this proviso for reading Crashaw overstate itself in trying to come to grips with the peculiar, often disturbing impact of his redundant imagery? Must we divorce words from their conventional meanings to appreciate how Crashaw's imagery reaches beyond its face value to include peculiar clusters of emotive associations? I would suggest that the way to appreciate the “incantatory power” behind Crahaw's imagery is not to obliviate the original sense of Crashaw's favorite words, or to block a conventional image—if such reading were possible—but to investigate the emotional investment which may, in fact—because of the origin of the word— make an image uniquely evocative for the poet.

Starting within the traditional system of Catholic devotional poetry, Crashaw's imagery grows—burgeons—not so much from the intellectual center of this system but from its