Platonism in English poetry of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries — Plato — John Shaqi
Platonism in English poetry of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries
Plato · en
“And looke at last up to that soveraine light,
From whose pure beams al perfect beauty springs,
That kindleth love in every godly spright,
Even the love of God, which loathing brings
Of this vile world, and these gay seeming things;
With whose sweete pleasures being so possest,
Thy straying thoughts henceforth for ever rest.”
(ll. 298–304.)
The second form which the doctrine of heavenly love assumed in English
is found in William Drummond’s “Song II—It autumn was, and on our
hemisphere.” The conception of heavenly beauty is not the ethical notion
of Spenser’s “Hymne,” but a less stimulating idea of the beauty of an
intelligible world of which this world is but a copy. The attraction in
this idea lay in its appeal to Drummond’s peculiar imagination,
delighting, as it did, in the sight of vastness. The poem is an
exhortation to the lover, who is Drummond himself, to cease his mourning
for his dead love, and to raise his mind to a love of heaven and of the
beauty of God there to be seen. The two ideas which Platonism
contributed are the notion of an intelligible world above this world of
sense, and of an absolute beauty of which all beauty on earth is but a
shadow.
The conception of a world above this world was suggested by Plato in his
“Phædo” and explained by Plotinus in his Enneads (VI. vii. 12) as a pure
intelligible world. “For since,” says Plotinus, “we say that this All
[the universe] is framed after the Yonder, as after a pattern, the All
must first exist yonder as a living entity, an animal; and since its
idea is complete, everything must exist yonder. Heaven, therefore, must
exist there as an animal, not without what here we call its stars, and
this is the idea of heaven. Yonder, too, of course, must be the Earth,
not bare, but far more richly furnished with life; in it are all
creatures that move on dry land and plants rooted in life. Sea, too, is
yonder, and all water ebbing and flowing in abiding life; and all
creatures that inhabit the water, and all the tribes of the air are part
of the all yonder, and all aerial beings, for the same reason as Air
itself.” In the “Phædo” (110–111), Plato lends color to his account by
calling attention to the fairness of the place and to the pleasantness
of life there. Drummond has seized upon this idea of an immaterial world
where all is fair and happy, and interprets it as the heaven whither the
young woman who has died is urging him to direct his love. Thus in her
addresses to Drummond she speaks of the character of the world where she
lives.
“Above this vast and admirable frame,
This temple visible, which World we name,
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There is a world, a world of perfect bliss,
Pure, immaterial, bright, ...
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