Note 1. These lines are taken from The Flaming Heart. Of it Prof. Saintsbury says (History of Elizabethan Literature, 1887): “His (Crashaw’s) masterpiece, one of the most astonishing things in English or any literature, comes without warning at the end of The Flaming Heart. For page after page the poet has been partly playing on some trifling conceit suggested by the picture of Saint Theresa and a seraph … and always he treats his subject in a vein of grovelling and grotesque conceit which the boy Dryden in the stage of his Elegy on Lord Hastings would have disdained. And then in a moment, in the twinkling of an eye, without warning of any sort, the metre changes, the poet’s inspiration catches fire, and then rushes up into the heaven of poetry the marvellous rocket of song: ‘Live in these conquering leaves,’ etc. The contrast is perhaps unique as regards the colourlessness of the beginning and the splendid colour of the end. But contrasts like it occur all over Crashaw’s work.” I have preferred to begin my selection from this poem at the point indicated by Prof. Saintsbury instead of at the line O thou undaunted daughter of desires, as do most editors. [back]
