Steps to the Temple. Sacred Poems, With other Delights of the Muses. By Richard Crashaw, some-times of Pembroke Hall, and late Fellow of S. Peters Coll. in Cambridge

London: Printed by T.W. for Humphrey Moseley, and are to be sold at his shop at the Princes Armes in St. Pauls Church-yard, 1646. FIRST EDITION. Hardcover. Fine. This is the issue with the title page set within a decorative typographical border (no precedence is given.) An excellent, tall copy, unusually bright and clean. Bound in contemporary sheepskin (with some wear, abrasions and stains.) The best copy to come onto the market in many years. First edition of Crashaw’s “Steps to the Temple” and “Delights of the Muses.” This volume contains Crashaw’s best-known poems: "The Weeper", "Wishes: To his (supposed) Mistresse", and his “Hymn to Saint Teresa”, which provided the inspiration to Coleridge’s "Christabel". Also included is Crashaw’s poem in praise of George Herbert, “On Mr. George Herberts Booke entituled The Temple of Sacred Poems, sent to a Gentlewoman.”

Along with Donne, Herbert and Marvell, Crashaw was one of the most important of the Metaphysical poets. "Compared with one another, Crashaw represents more of Donne's ecstasy, and Herbert more of his reason" (George Williamson) The son of a Puritan clergyman who eventually converted to Catholicism, Crashaw is best known for the intensity of his religious poetry.

“It is certain that Crashaw's English poetry was mostly written during his years in Cambridge. He wrote both on secular as well as sacred themes, but it is for his devotional poetry that he is rightly best remembered. His poetry was published in Steps to the Temple: Sacred Poems, with other Delights of the Muses by the royalist publisher Humphrey Moseley in 1646, with an expanded edition in 1648. As the title indicates Crashaw is presented as heir to George Herbert, another poet with Cambridge roots. But the styles of the two poets are different. Crashaw's devotional celebrations focus on believers as part of a large congregation, adding their voices to a chorus that stretches across liturgical history.

“A number of his poems originate in well-known medieval hymns, which he adapts rather than translates precisely. Crashaw has a preoccupation with female saints (the Virgin, Mary Magdalen, St Teresa), and this has generally supported a view of his Roman Catholicism. His thorough devotion to the Virgin, including accepting a version of her Assumption, would certainly have been frowned on by many within the English church, while St Teresa is one of the most celebrated of Counter-Reformation saints. However, interest in these figures was not particularly exceptional within Cambridge and Oxford Laudian circles. Crashaw's devotional orientation and his poetic manner are distinctive when placed within the larger body of contemporary writing, but are less so when witnessed alongside the preoccupations of Laudian Cambridge.

“Crashaw's poetic voice is a conspicuous one in English, however, and possesses an exuberant, often ecstatic quality that builds over many lines, celebrating an emotional excitement that greatly surpasses the tenor of the scriptural or medieval texts on which the poems are often founded. Crashaw's version of the medieval ‘Sancta Maria dolorum’ readily exemplifies this. Imploring Mary, witnessing her son's crucifixion, to teach the poet an appropriate fervour to share in the event, he asks that the poet, the Virgin, and by implication the reader may ‘study him so, till we mix / Wounds; and become one crucifix’, and concludes with a desire for an emotional merging that sees him become the child suckling on his saviour.

“Much of Crashaw's English writing, both sacred and secular, builds on the epigram, the genre in which he gained his initial reputation. A number of his English poems are indeed versions of the Latin epigrams published in his Epigrammata. In his longer poems Crashaw frequently writes what can virtually seem a series of extended epigrams. For instance, each of the thirty-one stanzas of ‘The Weeper’, Crashaw's poem on Mary Magdalen, is effectively a separate epigram commemorating the penitent saint's tears. This allows the poet full exercise in varying rhetorical exaggeration and invention around a theme, a common feature in contemporary neo-Latin verse. It is less usually employed to this extent in accomplished English poetry and has sometimes resulted in Crashaw's work being critically censured as ridiculously extravagant:

And now where're he strayes
Among the Galilean mountains,
Or more unwelcome wayes,
He's follow'd by two faithful fountains;
Two walking baths; two weeping motions;
Portable, & compendious oceans.
(‘The Weeper’, Poems)

(Thomas Healy, “Richard Crashaw” ODNB). (Inventory #: 5065)