ABSTRACT
Nowhere, I think, has Shakespeare approached anything like a philosophical expression of the distinction I have just formulated. He was surrounded by ‘Platonism’ and by ‘men of ideas’, or, at any rate, by men who made much use of ideas in which they at least professed to believe; but I think it is not going too far to say that of ‘ideas’ in the Platonic sense there is scarcely any trace in his sonnets. He thought, I am inclined to say, in terms rather of feeling and conviction, memory and imagination, than in terms of doctrine and idea, and almost all his statements are metaphors, or in process of becoming metaphors. We never find him declaring that his friend's beauty is a manifestation of the eternal and unchangeable beauty, or that what he loves in his friend is the immaterial and invisible soul that will survive the material and visible accidents it is temporarily informing, or that his love of what is heavenly in his friend is weaning his own soul from the love of terrestrial things and guiding it to heaven. Indeed, I think there is only one sonnet in the whole collection where even the distinction between body and soul, terrestrial and celestial, finds clear and memorable expression, 146, which I will quote with the anonymous and generally accepted emendation of its corrupt second line: Poor soul, the centre of my sinful earth, Thrall to these rebel powers that thee array, Why dost thou pine within and suffer dearth, Painting thy outward walls so costly gay? Why so large cost, having so short a lease, Dost thou upon thy fading mansion spend? Shall worms, inheritors of this excess, Eat up thy charge? Is this thy body's end? Then, soul, live thou upon thy servant's loss, And let that pine to aggravate thy store; Buy terms divine in selling hours of dross; Within be fed, without be rich no more: So shalt thou feed on Death, that feeds on men, And Death once dead, there's no more dying then.
