Richard Crashaw – 3 (“To His (Supposed) Mistress”)

“glist’ring shoe-ty..” ?  – Dorothy’s “ruby slippers” from The Wizard of Oz – ( via Smithsonian National Museum of American History)

Allen Ginsberg on Richard Crashaw continuing from here

AG: Then he (Crashaw) also has another poem that has a very pretty triplet thing,It’s rare in English to find three lines (one short, one longer, and then one longest, with the same rhyme -“be/she/me”, “lie/eye/destiny”, “birth/ forth/earth”)

So I’ll just read two or three stanzas of it because I don’t want to hang on to it too long (because you don’t have the text) – “Wishes To His (Supposed) Mistress

Who e’er she be/That not impossible she/That shall command my heart and me;/ Wher e’er she lie,/Lock’d up from mortal eye/In shady leaves of destiny;/ Till that ripe birth Of studied fate stand forth/And teach her fair steps to our earth;/Till that divine Idea take a shrine/Of crystal flesh, through which to shine;/Meet you her, my wishes,/ Bespeak her to my blisses,/And be ye call’d my absent kisses./ I wish her beauty/That owes not all his duty/To gaudy tire, or glist’ring shoe-ty..” –  ( I don’t know what shoe-ty is – S-H-O-E-T-Y) – “Something more than/Taffeta or tissue can,/Or rampant feather, or rich fan..” – (see, it’s almost like Marianne Moore‘s later writings) -“More than the spoil/Of shop, or silkworm’s toil,/Or a bought blush, or a set smile…” –  (That’s pretty good. “More than the spoil/Of shop, or silkworm’s toil,/Or a bought blush, or a set smile” – funny stanza form)

Student; Then that’s kind of a shoe maybe?
AG: No, no, ..it’s wishes to support (sic) – oh, that?..
Student: Shoe-ty?
AG; …not those shoe – or maybe – “” or glist’ring shoe-ty”. – maybe? a “glist’ring shoe-ty” maybe, that early stanza. Well, that goes on and on. That’s from the Auden anthology, those two (if you want to check them out, they’re from the Poets of the English Language, Volume 2Auden.)  

Audio for the above can be heard here, beginning at approximately thirty-five-and-three-quarter  minutes in  and concluding approximately  thirty-seven-and-a-half  minutes in

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