Great little One! whose all-embracing birth Lifts Earth to Heaven, stoops Heaven to Earth.

Richard Crashaw (c. 1612–1649), a leading English “metaphysical” poet, wrote intensely devotional verse shaped by the High Church/Laudian milieu and later by his conversion to Roman Catholicism during the upheavals of the English Civil War. The lines quoted are from his Christmas hymn celebrating the Nativity, where Crashaw dwells on the paradox of the Incarnation: the infinite God entering history as an infant. Such paradoxes—greatness in littleness, heaven in earth—are characteristic of Crashaw’s baroque religious imagination and of the wider seventeenth‑century devotional tradition that sought to move readers toward awe and adoration through vivid conceits.

The speaker addresses the Christ child as a “Great little One,” compressing Christian theology into a striking oxymoron. The “all-embracing birth” suggests that the Nativity is not merely a private event but one that reorders the cosmos: by becoming human, Christ “lifts Earth to Heaven” (opening a path of redemption and communion with God) while also “stoops Heaven to Earth” (divinity condescending into material, vulnerable life). The couplet dramatizes the central Christian claim that transcendence and immanence meet in the Incarnation, and it exemplifies Crashaw’s style—rapturous, paradox-loving, and intent on making doctrine emotionally and imaginatively palpable.