Poem of the week: Platonic Love by Abraham Cowley
A witty and engaging dance of ideas about the joining of bodies and the mixing of souls
Platonic Love
1
Indeed I must confess,
When souls mix ’tis an happiness,
But not complete till bodies too do join,
And both our wholes into one whole combine;
But half of heaven the souls in glory taste
Till by love in heaven at last
Their bodies too are placed.
2
In thy immortal part
Man, as well as I, thou art.
But something ’tis that differs thee and me,
And we must one even in that difference be.
I thee both as a man and woman prize,
For a perfect love implies
Love in all capacities.
3
Can that for true love pass
When a fair woman courts her glass?
Something unlike must in love’s likeness be:
His wonder is one and variety.
For he whose soul nought but a soul can move
Does a new Narcissus prove,
And his own image love.
4
That souls do beauty know
’Tis to the body’s help they owe;
If when they know’t they straight abuse that trust
And shut the body from’t, ’tis as unjust
As if I brought my dearest friend to see
My mistress and at th’ instant he
Should steal her quite from me.
In Platonic Love, the Cavalier poet Abraham Cowley (1618-1667) discusses heterosexual relationships from a perspective that firmly promotes the significance of the body. The poem addresses a woman, and may contain an appeal for her sexual surrender, but the tone is sincere as well as light, the argument gracefully intellectual as it revises conventional interpretations of Plato.
Cowley’s re-evaluation of the body in relation to the soul, parallels his view of woman as man’s spiritual equal. In the second verse, he discerns parity between a man’s and a woman’s “immortal part” (the soul). “Man, as well as I, thou art” is a striking assertion of that parity. Love “in all capacities” extends the idea of gender, without overruling the significance of the “something” that “differs thee and me”.
The third verse seems at first a digression on the subject of self-love. It focuses on the woman who “courts her glass” and so merely qualifies as a “new Narcissus”. Cowley might have pointed to glass-courting as a type of contemporary male behaviour, too, and it seems he could be aiming a small barb at the woman his poem has in mind. His deeper argument is that the body is left out of such a relationship: love’s “likeness”, its literal reflection, declares its nature to be unlike love. The wonder of love (“love” here personified with the male pronoun) is “one and variety”.
So, in fact, Cowley develops his theme in that seeming digression, and takes it further in the final verse, arguing that it is the body, not as a mere image in a mirror but as tangible reality, which enables the soul to “know” beauty. “Know” implies recognition, and, of course, the verb also has sexual connotations
Much of the charm of the poem lies in the ebb and flow of the rhythms, the sense that this is argument as dance. Cowley’s technical fluency is matched by the easy ability to inhabit philosophical and worldly spheres at the same time. He may not be as boldly physical as Donne, but he is direct about the joining of bodies, and the pleasure that complements the mixing of souls.
An unexpectedly down-to-earth analogy concludes the poem. Ignoring the significance of the body is described as an abuse of trust like that of a man stealing his best friend’s girlfriend as soon as they’re introduced. How exactly the comparison fits the argument is questionable, perhaps, but the mental picture it creates is clever, hard-hitting and intimate – a flourish with which to close the discussion, and consider the argument won by Cowley
