In the same masque love is defined in accordance with the myth of Penia and Poros:

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:

In “The Barriers” where Truth and Opinion—a division of the state of knowing according to its degree of certainty common in Plato as knowledge and opinion (“Republic,” V. 476–478)—hold a discussion on marriage, an angel declares that

Here under the name of Unity the true nature of love is indicated.

In Drayton’s seventh eclogue Batte replies to a charge of cruelty against love which is made by his fellow-shepherd, Borril, with the

His argument is that love is the great bond of the universe.

A more common appropriation of the teachings of Platonism was made in the love lyrics—chiefly the sonnet—written in the Petrarchian manner. Petrarchism was as much a manner of writing sonnets as it was a method of making love. On its stylistic side it was characterized by the use of antitheses, puns, and especially of conceits. In the Platonic theory of love and beauty a certain amount of material was offered which could be reworked into a form suited for the compact brevity of the sonnet. Sidney, Spenser, and Shakespeare are the three chief sonnet writers of the last decade of the sixteenth century in whose work this phase of Platonism is to be found; but its presence, though faint, can be felt in others.

One way in which this theory was applied is found in the manner in which these poets speak of the beauty of their beloved. Plato has stated that wisdom is the most lovely of all ideas, and that, were there a visible image of her, she would be transporting. (“Phædrus,” 250.) Sidney seizes upon this suggestion, and by identifying his Stella with wisdom he can frame a sonnet ending in a couplet that shall have the required epigrammatic point. He writes:

Shakespeare is able to praise the beauty of the subject of his sonnets by identifying him with the absolute beauty of the Platonic philosophy, and by describing him in accordance with this notion. Thus he confesses that his argument is simply the fair, kind, and true, back of which statement may be inferred the theory upheld by Platonism that the good, the beautiful, and the true are but different phases of one reality. His love, he says, cannot be called idolatry because his songs are directed to this theme, for only in his friend are these three themes united into one.

In another sonnet one phase of this argument is given a detailed treatment, and the poet’s object is to praise the beauty of his friend by describing its contrast with the beauty of earth, just as if he were speaking of absolute beauty. In this sonnet he uses the Platonic phraseology of the substance and the shadow, by which he means first, the reality that makes a thing what it is, the substance, not the matter or stuff of which it is made; and second, the reflection of that reality in the objective world, the shadow of the substance, not the obscuration of light.^[10] He thus writes of his friend’s beauty as if it were the substance of beauty, beauty absolute, of which all other beauty is but a reflection.

Spenser, too, praises his beloved by conceiving her as absolute beauty, of which all other objects are but shadows. In the light of her beauty all the glory of the world appears but a vain show.

In George Daniel the idea of the substance and shadow again occurs. He says that it is enough for him if he may behold his mistress’s face, although others may boast of her favors; for in contemplating her glories he sees how all other forms are but empty shadows of her perfection.

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.

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.

In a second lyric, “A Song to Amoret,” he describes his love as superior to that which a “mighty amorist” could give, because it is a love that was born with his soul in heaven.

Thus far the tenets of Platonic theory have been used in a more or less direct way; but in several instances the Platonic idea is present only in the writer’s mind, and the reader is left to unravel it by his own ingenuity. Thus Shakespeare urges his friend to marry because in his death truth and beauty will both end—a possible inference being that his friend is ideal beauty.

In another sonnet Shakespeare plays with words in an attempt to excuse his truant muse for not praising his friend’s beauty. His muse may say that since his friend is true beauty he needs no praise.

But so closely identified is the praise of his friend’s beauty with the immortality conferred by poetry that Shakespeare cannot justly excuse the silence of his muse

Again, Shakespeare describes how, when absent from his friend, he is able to play with the flowers as shadows of his friend’s beauty.

In Spenser the lover is able to make an appeal for pity by reference to the Platonic conception of the idea of the beloved which the lover is supposed to behold in his soul.

The end which this conception of making love after the manner of the Platonist served was thought to be found in a purification of love. By praising the beauty of the beloved in such lofty terms the poet was able to set off the purity of his love from any connection with mere sensual desire. Thus Spenser testifies to the ennobling power of the beauty of his beloved’s eyes.

In Sidney there is a direct reference to the power of Plato’s thought to lead the mind from the desire with which he is struggling.

The application of the tenets of Platonic theory to the writing of love lyrics in the Petrarchian manner, however, was never anything more than a courtly way of making love through exaggerated conceit and fine writing. Fulke Greville saw clearly the relation between the love of woman and the love of the idea of her beauty. In the tenth sonnet of his “Cælica” he asks what can love find in a mind where all is passion; rather he says go back to

The love of the idea of beauty, however, in its absolute nature is nowhere present in the mass of love lyrics written between 1590 and 1600. The term is used to give title to Drayton’s “Idea,” and to denominate the object of twelve sonnets addressed by Craig to “Idea”; and anagrams on the French word for the term L’Idée, Diella and Delia, are used to name two series of poems by Linche and Samuel Daniel, respectively. Crashaw’s “Wishes” is addressed to “his (supposed) mistresse,” as an idea. No better commentary on the whole movement can be made than these words of Spenser in which it is easily seen how the method conduced only to feeding the lower desires of the soul in love. Writing in 1596, in the midst of the period when sonnet writing was most popular in England, he says, speaking of his two “Hymnes”:

“Having in the greener times of my youth, composed these former two Hymnes in the praise of Love and beautie, and finding that the same too much pleased those of like age and disposition, which being too vehemently caried with that kind of affection, do rather sucke out poyson to their strong passion, then hony to their honest delight, I was moved ... to call in the same. But being unable so to doe, by reason that many copies thereof were formerly scattered abroad, I resolved at least to amend, and by way of retraction to reforme them, making in stead of those two Hymnes of earthly or naturall love and beautie, two others of heavenly and celestiall.”

The great representative of Platonism in English poetry thus condemns the less vital phase of Platonic thought. The great weakness of the theory lay in the fact that it had no moral significance; and just here lay the great strength of Plato’s ethics. Although preaching that beauty was a spiritual thing, this phase of Platonic æsthetics never blended with the conception of the beauty of moral goodness. And it failed to do this because it is a theory not of Plato but of Plotinus, who throughout the period of the Renaissance was understood to expound the true meaning of Plato’s thought. But Plato left no system of æsthetics; Plotinus, however, constructed a theory to account for beauty in its strictest sense. Now Ficino in his propaganda of Platonic theory throughout the Renaissance interpreted Plato’s “Symposium” in the light of Plotinus and thus in his commentary, the source of all Renaissance theorizing on love, is found the theory reflected in the English poets. This fusion of Plato’s ethics with the æsthetics of Plotinus was not perfect; and to the deep moral genius of Spenser’s mind the disparity soon became evident.

The Platonic theory of love had enabled the English poets to write about their passion as a desire of enjoying the spiritual quality of beauty in their beloved. In those poets in whom the Petrarchistic manner is evident, it is the object of love on which the attention centres; only in a slight way did they treat of the nature of love as a passion. The result of the discussion of love, as opened by Platonism, ended, however, in an attempt to place love upon a purely spiritual basis and to write about it as if it were a psychological fact that was to be known by analysis. A consideration of beauty, as the object of love, is absent; attention is directed to the quality of the passion as one felt in the soul rather than by the sense; and when the attraction of woman is present in this love it is carefully differentiated from the attraction of sex. In the body of love lyrics written in the seventeenth century the distinctive traits of this passion are clearly explained.

The chief trait of this kind of love is that it concerns only the soul. The union of the lover and the beloved is simply a union of their souls which because of the high nature of the soul can triumph over time and space. The character of this union is described in Donne’s “Ecstacy.” The two lovers are described as sitting in silence, watching one another. While thus engaged their souls are so mysteriously mingled that they are mixed into one greater soul which is not subject to change. Even when the passion descends from this height to the plane of human affections there is no essential change in the purity of the love.

In a like strain Randolph in “A Platonic Elegy” praises his love as that founded on reason, not on sense. The true union in love, he says, is the meeting of essence with essence.

The great value which this purely spiritual love was supposed to possess was that it was unaffected either by time or distance. The union, not being one known to sense, could exist as well in the absence of the lovers as in the presence of both. This thought is a great comfort and is emphasized as the peculiarity in the lovers’ passion that sets it apart from the vulgar kind. Thus Donne in the song, “Soul’s Joy,” consoles his beloved with the assurance that their souls may meet though their bodies be absent.

In his “Valediction Forbidding Mourning,” Donne again recurs to the subject of separation and explains by the figure of the compass how their souls will be one. The love in which the mind is bent on the objects of sense cannot admit of absence; but the love shared by Donne and his mistress is so refined that their souls suffer only an expansion and not separation in absence.

Even in death this love will still live. Thus Lord Herbert explains that his love has passed over into that of the soul, and it will be as immortal as the soul.

The second characteristic of this love is that it is purely contemplative, informing the mind with knowledge rather than satisfying the senses with pleasure. Habington has left a poem entitled “To the World. The Perfection of Love,” in which he contrasts this love in which the soul is engaged with thoughts with the love of sense.

By virtue of this contemplation in love the passion was freed from any disturbing element due to absence, just as the restriction of love to the soul had been thought to do. Vaughan boasts to Amoret that he can dispense with a sight of her face or with a kiss because when absent from her he can court the mind.

In the examples thus far given, the character of the passion as shared by lover and beloved has been merely described. There was an attempt made in some of this poetry to define love as if it were a something to be analyzed—a product, as it were, of psychological elaboration. Vaughan has indicated the two traits in the love lyrist of the seventeenth century, when he gives the following title to a lyric,—“To Amoret, of the Difference ’Twixt Him and Other Lovers, and What True Love Is.” In defining “What True Love Is,” the poets show that it cannot be desire, but is rather an essence pure in itself, and in one instance it is described as something unknowable either to sense or to mind.

Donne has left a letter in verse “To the Countess of Huntingdon,” in which he carefully explains how love cannot be desire. Sighing and moaning may be love, but it is love made in a weak way; love should never cast one down, but should elevate.

At first love was mere desire, ignorant of its object; but now love is a matter of the soul, and it is profane to call rages of passion love.