In Sidney there is a direct reference to the power of Plato’s thought to lead the mind from the desire with which he is struggling.
“Your words, my freends me causelesly doe blame,
My young minde marde whom love doth menace so:
· · · · ·
That Plato I have reade for nought, but if he tame
Such coltish yeeres; that to my birth I owe
Nobler desires:”
(xxi.)
The application of the tenets of Platonic theory to the writing of love lyrics in the Petrarchian manner, however, was never anything more than a courtly way of making love through exaggerated conceit and fine writing. Fulke Greville saw clearly the relation between the love of woman and the love of the idea of her beauty. In the tenth sonnet of his “Cælica” he asks what can love find in a mind where all is passion; rather he says go back to
“that heavenly quire