'Eternity Shut In a Span'

From a lovely Christmas poem by Richard Crashaw (c. 1613-1649), “In the Holy Nativity of Our Lord,” a sort of truncated oratorio without music, that transcends any single season:

“Welcome, all wonders in one sight!

Eternity shut in a span;

Summer in winter; day in night;

Heaven in earth, and God in man.

Great little one, whose all-embracing birth

Lifts earth to heaven, stoops heaven to earth.”

“Span” originally had a specific meaning, according to the OED: “The distance from the tip of the thumb to the tip of the little finger . . . when the hand is fully extended.” A very human unit of measure. The height of horses was measured in “hands,” each the equivalent of about four inches. Crashaw’s phrasing, “Eternity shut in a span,” recalls Blake:

“To see a World in a Grain of Sand

And a Heaven in a Wild Flower

Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand

And Eternity in an hour”

Crashaw’s span is not an inanimate object but an infant, much contained in a small package. In “The Pulley,” Crashaw’s older contemporary, George Herbert gives “span” a different human context:  

“When God at first made man,

Having a glass of blessings standing by,

'Let us,' said he, ‘pour on him all we can.

Let the world’s riches, which dispersèd lie,

Contract into a span.’”

On Christmas night in 1928, Yvor Winters writes in a letter to Allen Tate: “I am hypnotized by the cadences in Crashaw: cadences like the definitions of Aquinas.”

[The final quote is from The Selected Letters of Yvor Winters, ed. R.L. Barth, Swallow Press/Ohio University Press, 2000.]