“Upon the Bleeding Crucifix” by Richard Crashaw (poem)

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Jesu, no more! It is full tide;
From thy hands and from thy feet,
From thy head, and from thy side,
All the purple rivers meet.

What need thy fair head bear a part
In showers, as if thine eyes had none?
What need they help to drown thy heart,
That strives in torrents of its own?

Water’d by the showers they bring,
The thorns that thy blest brow encloses
(A cruel and a costly spring)
Conceive proud hopes of proving roses.

Thy restless feet now cannot go
For us and our eternal good,
As they were ever wont. What though?
They swim, alas! in their own flood.

Thy hand to give thou canst not lift,
Yet will thy hand still giving be.
It gives, but O, itself’s the gift,
It gives though bound, though bound ’tis free.

But, O thy side, thy deep-digg’d side,
That hath a double Nilus going:
Nor ever was the Pharian tide
Half so fruitful, half so flowing.

No hair so small, but pays his river
To this Red Sea of thy blood;
Their little channels can deliver
Something to the general flood.

But while I speak, whither are run
All the rivers named before?
I counted wrong: there is but one;
But O that one is one all o’er.

Rain-swol’n rivers may rise proud,
Bent all to drown and overflow;
But when indeed all’s overflow’d,
They themselves are drowned too.

This thy blood’s deluge (a dire chance,
Dear Lord, to thee) to us is found
A deluge of deliverance,
A deluge lest we should be drown’d.

Ne’er wast thou in a sense so sadly true,
The well of living waters, Lord, till now.

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This poem was published in the second edition of Steps to the Temple: Sacred Poems, with Other Delights of the Muses (London, 1648) under the title “On the Bleeding Body of Our Crucified Lord”; an earlier version appeared in the book’s first edition in 1646 under the title “On the Bleeding Wounds of Our Crucified Lord.” I use the title by which it is most commonly known, “Upon the Bleeding Crucifix,” first assigned to it in Crashaw’s posthumously published collection Carmen Deo Nostro (Paris, 1652). I’ve modernized the spellings.

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Richard Crashaw (1612–1649) was one of the major Metaphysical poets of seventeenth-century England, a movement marked by the use of elaborate figurative language, original conceits, paradoxes, and philosophical exploration. He was also a priest. Ordained in the Church of England in 1638, he was installed as curate of the Church of St Mary the Less in Cambridge, embracing the high-church reforms of Archbishop William Laud, for which he was persecuted. In 1643, during the English Civil War, Oliver Cromwell and his Puritan posse forced Crashaw into exile in France, where he converted to Roman Catholicism. Waiting for a papal retainer, he struggled with poverty and ill health. Pope Innocent X finally granted Crashaw a post at a seminary in Rome in 1647, and two years later he was given a cathedral benefice in Loreto, where he died of a fever at age thirty-six. He published two collections of poetry during his lifetime.

For more Crashaw on the blog, see the article “The ‘Nothing’ that won our salvation.”