Platonism in English poetry of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries
Plato · en
In a few of Jonson’s masques there are slight attempts to dignify the
subject of love in the manner of Spenser’s “Hymnes.” In “The Masque of
Beauty” love is described as the creator of the universe, and beauty is
mentioned as that for which the world was created. In one of the hymns
occurs this stanza:
“When Love at first, did move
From out of Chaos, brightned
So was the world, and lightned
As now.
_1. Echo._ As now!
_2. Echo._ As now!
Yield Night, then to the light,
As Blackness hath to Beauty:
Which is but the same duty.
It was for Beauty that the world was made,
And where she reigns, Love’s lights admit no shade.”
In a second song a reference is made to the mysterious nativity of love.
“So Beauty on the waters stood,
When Love had sever’d earth from flood!
So when he parted air from fire,
He did with concord all inspire!
And then a motion he them taught,
That elder than himself was thought.
Which thought was, yet, the child of earth,
For Love is elder than his birth.”
In “Love’s Triumph Through Callipolis” the same ideas appear. In this
masque, after the band of sensual lovers has been driven from the
suburbs of the City of Beauty (Callipolis), and a lustration of the
place has followed, Euclia, or “a fair glory, appears in the heavens,
singing an applausive Song, or Pæan of the whole.”
“So love emergent out of chaos brought
The world to light!
And gently moving on the waters, wrought
All form to sight!
Love’s appetite
Did beauty first excite:
And left imprinted in the air
These signatures of good and fair,
Which since have flow’d, flow’d forth upon the sense
To wonder first, and then to excellence,
By virtue of divine intelligence!”
In the same masque love is defined in accordance with the myth of Penia
and Poros:
“Love is the right affection of the mind,
The noble appetite of what is best:
Desire of union with the thing design’d,
But in fruition of it cannot rest.
“The father Plenty is, the mother Want,
Plenty the beauty which it wanteth draws;
Want yields itself: affording what is scant:
So both affections are the union’s cause.”
In “Love Freed From Ignorance and Folly” the sustaining power of love in
keeping the parts of the universe in concord is used to combat the
accusation that love is mere cruelty. Love, who is represented as a
captive of the Sphynx, thus replies to the charge: