Three themes in one, which wondrous scope affords.
‘Fair, kind, and true,’ have often liv’d alone,
Which three, till now, never kept seat in one.”
(cv.)
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.
“What is your substance, whereof are you made,
That millions of strange shadows on you tend?
Since every one hath, every one, one shade,
And you, but one, can every shadow lend.
Describe Adonis, and the counterfeit