Platonism in English poetry of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries

Plato · en
“It is Enough to me,
              If I her Face may see;
            Let others boast her Favours, and pretend
              Huge Interests; whilst I
              Adore her Modestie;
            Which Tongues cannot deprave, nor Swords defend.

                   ·       ·       ·       ·       ·

              “But while I bring
              My verse to Sing
            Her Glories, I am strucke with wonder, more;
              And all the Formes I see,
              But Emptie Shadowes bee,
            Of that Perfection which I adore.

              “Be silent then,
              All Tongues of Men,
            To Celebrate the Sex: for if you fall
              To other Faces, you
              Wander, and but pursue
            Inferior objects, weake and partiall.”

            (Ode xxiv.)

A second tenet of Platonism which was reworked into English love poetry
was its conception of love. As Spenser had explained in his “Hymne in
Honour of Beautie,” true love has its source in the life of two souls in
heaven. (ll. 200–213.) Drummond uses the idea to explain the purity of
his love.

         “That learned Grecian, who did so excel
         In knowledge passing sense, that he is nam’d
         Of all the after-worlds divine, doth tell,
         That at the time when first our souls are fram’d,
         Ere in these mansions blind they come to dwell,
         They live bright rays of that eternal light,
         And others see, know, love, in heaven’s great height,
         Not toil’d with aught to reason doth rebel.
         Most true it is, for straight at the first sight
         My mind me told, that in some other place
         It elsewhere saw the idea of that face,
         And lov’d a love of heavenly pure delight;
         No wonder now I feel so fair a flame,
         Sith I her lov’d ere on this earth she came.”

         (“Poems.” First Pt., S. vii.)

In Vaughan the same theory of love is again referred to as a proof of
the poet’s lofty passion. In “To Amoret. Walking in a Starry Evening,”
he says that even were her face a distant star shining upon him, he
would be sure of a sympathy between it and himself, because their minds
were united in love by no accident or chance of sight, but were designed
for one another.

                  “But, Amoret, such is my fate,
                    That if thy face a star
                    Had shin’d from far,
                  I am persuaded in that state,
                    ’Twixt thee and me,
                    Of some predestin’d sympathy.

                  “For sure such two conspiring minds,
                    Which no accident, or sight,
                    Did thus unite;
                  Whom no distance can confine
                    Start, or decline,
                  One for another were design’d.”

                  (Stzs. 3, 4.)