Loving Rhyme: Reading Mastery in Crashaw's “The Flaming Heart”

Abstract

This chapter explores the workings of rhyme in Richard Crashaw’s “The Flaming Heart,” with focus on how the poem’s couplets produce likeness and difference in ways both painfully commonplace and completely unpredictable. Crashaw’s speaker uses couplets to think through how a painter wrongly represents Teresa of Avila’s Life and how he can best read that Life, with rhymes that create effects of difference—and likeness—in conservative but also radical fashion. Early strophes adopt a critical tone, creating effects of distance and difference as a means for establishing control and even mastery, over Teresa as his subject and over readers who would properly adore her. Later, though, the speaker strives for likeness with his rhymes, interested now in “rhyming” with Teresa by being mastered by her writing. In the final strophe, the poem’s Teresa more strongly resembles the saint of the Life, and the speaker himself resembles her more too, relinquishing mastery in favor of humility and a longing for self-loss. Yet he remains unlike Teresa in not wishing to move beyond loss to rebirth, and in using reading—and rhyme—to help himself to a distinctly poetic kind of death.