By any service I might do to thee,
Or ought that else might to thee pleasing bee.”
(ll. 4–10.)
In his closing stanzas he expresses the wish of coming at last to the object of his desire. (ll. 298–300.) In the “Hymne in Honour of Beautie,” he openly confesses a desire that through his hymn
“It may so please that she at length will streame
Some deaw of grace, into my withered hart,
After long sorrow and consuming smart.”
(ll. 29–31.)
The only respect in which these hymns differ from the mass of love poetry of their time is in the method by which Spenser treated the common subject of the poetical amorists of the Renaissance. In singing the praises of love and beauty he drew upon the doctrines of Italian Platonism, and by the power of his own genius blended the purely expository and lyrical strains so that at times it is difficult to separate them. The presence of Platonic doctrine, however, is felt in the dignified treatment of the passion of love and of beauty.
In the “Hymne in Honour of Love” love is described as no merely cruel passion inflicted by the tyrannical Cupid of the amorist, but as the manifestation in man of the great informing power which brought the universe out of chaos and which now maintains it in order and concord. According to Ficino, the greatest representative of Italian Platonism during the Renaissance, one truth established by the speech of Eryximachus in the “Symposium” is that love is the creator and preserver of all things. “Through this,” Ficino says in his “Commentarium in Convivium,” “fire moves air by sharing its heat; the air moves the water, the water moves the earth; and vice versa the earth draws the water to itself; water, the air; and the air, the fire. Plants and trees also beget their like because of a desire of propagating their seed. Animals, brutes, and men are allured by the same desire to beget offspring.” (III. 2.) And in summing up his discussion he says, “Therefore all parts of the universe, since they are the work of one artificer and are members of the same mechanism like to one another both in being and in life, are linked together by a certain mutual love, so that love may be rightly declared the perpetual bond of the universe and the unmoving support of its parts and the firm basis of the whole mechanism.” (III. 3.) Holding to this conception of love Spenser comes to a praise of the