The Female Body in Richard Crashaw’s Sacred Poetry: Transcending physicality?

Résumé 0

This quotation from one of Crashaw’s hymns dedicated to Teresa of Avila illustrates the quasi-anamorphic change of perspective the poetic voice invites readers to perform in order to understand the spiritual nature of the Spanish mystic. Bodily images of breasts, wombs, bosoms or crying eyes are common throughout the poet’s work and are indeed so many smaller spheres reduplicating the heavens. I contend that those representations of the female body suggest a transfer from the physical to the spiritual, away from sensory perceptions, in order to comprehend transcendental truths. We may however wonder if those representations always imply the necessity to forgo the body or if they entail a fusion of the physical and the spiritual. Are opposites merely “yoked by violence together” to quote from Samuel Johnson’s well-known definition of Metaphysical poetry? How does the masculine poetic voice convey this blurring of the boundaries between the physical and the spiritual? Adopting a formalist and historicist perspective, I will strive to ascertain the importance of the female body in Crashaw’s devotional verse focusing on the three women he most frequently portrayed, namely the Virgin Mary, Mary Magdalene and Teresa of Avila. I will first analyse the way representations of the female body turn the laws governing the physical world upside down in Crashaw’s still geocentric world picture. I will then study the reversibility of some bodily images and finally try to show the importance of the body in the way these female figures become or try to become one with God.