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
“To thee, thou _only Fair_, my Soul aspires
With _Holy Breathings_, _languishing_ Desires
To thee _m’ inamour’d_, panting Heart does move,
By Efforts of _Ecstatic_ Love.
How do thy glorious streams of Light
Refresh my intellectual sight!
Tho broken, and strain’d through a Skreen
Of envious Flesh that stands between!
When shall m’ imprison’d Soul be free,
That she thy Native Uncorrected Light may see,
And gaze upon thy _Beatifick_ Face to all Eternity?”
(Stz. 4.)
The violence of passion in these poets is absent in George Herbert, and
even the presence of the beatific vision, as a conscious experience of
the soul known after the long travail of its search for beauty, is not
in the least discernible. Still, the conviction that there is a higher
beauty than that seen on earth, and that in truth lies this beauty, is
felt beneath the mildness of Herbert’s devotion. In two sonnets, which
he sent to his mother in 1608, he laments the decay of any true love for
God among the poets, and contrasts the beauty of God with the beauties
of the amorists. To him the beauty of God lies in the discovery.
“Such poor invention burns in their [the amorists’] low minde,
Whose fire is wild, and doth not upward go
To praise, and on Thee, Lord, some ink bestow.
Open the bones, and you shall nothing finde
In the best face but filth; when, Lord, in Thee
The beauty lies in the discoverie.”
(S. i.)
He is, accordingly, content to sing the praises of God.
“Let foolish lovers, if they will love dung,
With canvas, not with arras, clothe their shame;
Let Follie speak in her own native tongue:
True Beautie dwells on high; ours in a flame
But borrow’d thence to light us thither;
Beautie and beauteous words should go together.”
(“The Forerunners,” ll. 25–30.)
So intimately has this notion of the spiritual nature of true beauty
blended with the simple experience of his devotional life that he can
ask
“Is there in truth no beautie?
Is all good structure in a winding-stair?
May no lines passe, except they do their dutie
Not to a true, but painted chair?
· · · · ·
Must purling streams refresh a lover’s loves?
Must all be vail’d while he that reades divines,
Catching the sense at two removes?”[7]
As for himself, he says:
“I envie no man’s nightingale or spring;
Nor let them punish me with loss of rhyme,
Who plainly say, My God, my King.”
(“Jordan.”)
In that truth he found his beauty.