| Popis: |
The poems of the last chapter introduced us to a singularly rewarding and cohesive phase in Crashaw’s life. Yet the repose which began in 1635, when he had been elected to a Fellowship at Peterhouse and felt authorised to cooperate in the high-flown work of restoring Mary to her former glory in the English Church, lasted only a few years beyond 1638, when he became ‘chaplaine of the virgine myld’ as curate of Little St Mary’s. In The Femall Glory, Anthony Stafford reminded readers of this period that ‘a fatalle sadnesse haunted [Mary] from the birth of her onely Sonne to his buriall’ (p. 176). A premonitory sadness also cast its shadow over the vigilants in Crashaw’s circle who, while content to live in peace apart from the world, were perhaps tried, in return, with greater foresight. Nicholas Ferrar, ‘fearing and foreseeing the ill times to come, about a year before he dyed, wch was anno 1637’,1 gave vent not only to innate melancholy but to a more general apprehension that unnatural custodial calm prevailed under Laudian rule.2 In 1641, the Little Gidding community would, as he had foreboded, suffer alongside Crashaw when the Parliamentarians ‘offered violence to the Family & House’ and spread ‘abominable falshoods’ of the Ferrars’ ‘Arminian Nunnery’. |
