(ll. 165–184.)
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:
“The wisest scholler of the wight most wise,
By Phœbus doome, with sugred sentence sayes:
That vertue if it once meete with our eyes,
Strange flames of love it in our soules would rayse.
But for that man with paine this truth discries,
While he each thing in sences ballances wayes,
And so, nor will nor can behold these skyes,