Platonism in English poetry of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries

by John Smith Harrison

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“So every spirit, as it is most pure,

And hath in it the more of heavenly light,

So it the fairer bodie doth procure

To habit in, and it more fairely dight

With chearefull grace and amiable sight.

For of the soule the bodie forme doth take:

For soul is forme, and doth the bodie make.”

(ll. 109–136.)

The obvious objection which one might make to this theory, that it does not cover the whole ground inasmuch as it could never account for the fact of the existence of a good soul in any but a beautiful form, was answered by the further explanation that when the matter of which the soul makes its body is unyielding, the soul must content itself with a less beautiful form. (Ficino, VI. 6.) Thus Spenser adds: