However this may be, one notes a tendency in much purely idealistic and philosophical love poetry to present us with a mere skeleton of abstraction. Part of this effect may be the reader's fault, of course. Plato assures us that the harmonies of mathematics are more ravishing than the harmonies of music to the pure spirit, but many of us must take his word for it; in the same way it may be that when we fail to appreciate certain celebrations of ideal love it is because of our "muddy vesture of decay" which hinders our hearing its harmonies.
Within the last one hundred and fifty years three notable attempts, of widely varying success, have been made to write a purely philosophical love poem.[Footnote: Keats' Endymion is not discussed here, though it seems to have much in common with the philosophy of the Symposium. See Sidney Colvin, John Keats, pp. 160ff.]
Bulwer Lytton's Milton was, if one may believe the press notices, the most favorably received of his poems, but it is a signal example of aspiring verse that misses both the sensuous beauty of poetry, and the intellectual content of philosophy. Milton is portrayed as the life-long lover of an incarnation of beauty too attenuated to be human and too physical to be purely ideal. At first Milton devotes himself to this vision exclusively, but, hearing the call of his country in distress, he abandons her, and their love is not suffered to culminate till after death. Bulwer Lytton cites the Phædrus of Plato as the basis of his allegory, reminding us,
The Athenian guessed that when our souls descend
From some lost realm (sad aliens here to be),
Dim broken memories of the state before,
Form what we call our reason…
… Is not Love,
Of all those memories which to parent skies
Mount struggling back—(as to their source, above,
In upward showers, imprisoned founts arise:)
Oh, is not Love the strongest and the clearest?
Greater importance attaches to a recent treatment of the theme by George Edward Woodberry. His poem, Agathon, dealing with the young poet of Plato's Symposium, is our most literal interpretation of Platonism. Agathon is sought out by the god of love, Eros, who is able to realize his divinity only through the perfection of man's love of beauty. He chooses Agathon as the object of instruction because Agathon is a poet, one of those
Whose eyes were more divinely touched
In that long-memoried world whence souls set forth.
As the poem opens, Agathon is in the state of the favorite poet of nineteenth century imagination, loving, yet discontented with, the beauty of the senses. To Diotima, the wise woman of the Symposium, he expresses his unhappiness:
Still must I mourn
That every lovely thing escapes the heart
Even in the moment of its cherishing.
Eros appears and promises Agathon that if he will accept his love, he may find happiness in eternal beauty, and his poetical gift will be ennobled:
Eros I am, the wooer of men's hearts.
Unclasp thy lips; yield me thy close embrace;
So shall thy thoughts once more to heaven climb,
Their music linger here, the joy of men.