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
“Those golden letters which so brightly shine
In heaven’s great volume gorgeously divine;
The wonders all in sea, in earth, in air,
Be but dark pictures of that sovereign Fair;
Be tongues, which still thus cry unto your ear,
(Could ye amidst world’s cataracts them hear,)
From fading things, fond wights, lift your desire,
And in our beauty, his, us made, admire:
If we seem fair, O think how fair is he
Of whose fair fairness shadows, steps, we be.
No shadow can compare it with the face,
No step with that dear foot which did it trace.”
(ll. 197–234.)
This “Song,” then, though drawing on a different phase of Platonism—its
more philosophic and fanciful side,[6] not its deep ethical
truth—follows the same order of thought as Spenser’s “Hymne,” and like
that presents heavenly love as a love known in the soul and growing out
of a correct notion of the relative values of the visible beauty of the
senses and the invisible beauty of mind.
In Drummond heavenly love is a progression out of the romantic love of
woman. It is not explicitly so stated in the “Song,” but in a sonnet,
the subject of which refers to the young woman of the longer poem, he
writes:
“Sith it hath pleas’d that First and only Fair
To take that beauty to himself again,
Which in this world of sense not to remain,
But to amaze, was sent, and home repair;
The love which to that beauty I did bear
(Made pure of mortal spots which did it stain,
And endless, which even death cannot impair),
I place on Him who will it not disdain.”
(Poems, Second Pt. S. xiii.)
This is a note heard in other poets where heavenly love is described as
naturally growing out of earthly love when the right idea of the nature
of the object of that lower passion has been learned. Thus in Milton it
is taught that the love of woman must not be passion, but must be a
scale by which the mind may mount to the heavenly world. The passion
which Adam feels for the loveliness that hedges the presence of Eve—
“when I approach
Her loveliness, so absolute she seems
And in herself complete, so well to know
Her own, that what she wills to do or say
Seems wisest, virtuousest, discreetest, best:
· · · · ·
and, to consummate all,
Greatness of mind and nobleness their seat
Build in her loveliest, and create an awe
About her, as a guard angelic placed—”
(VIII. 546–559.)