Psychodia Platonica; or, A Platonicall Song of the Soul  

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"Psychodia Platonica; or, A Platonicall Song of the Soul" is a poem by Henry More.

In 1642 More published his Psychodia Platonica and in 1647 he brought out an enlarged edition of this Platonick Song of the Soul under the general heading Philosophicall Poems. This gigantic affair in Spenserian stanzas was certainly not calculated to captivate the masses who run. But it was the profound if eccentric utterance of a man who stood on the battle-line of a great controversy of the day. More's dedication to his father indicates how much of his idealism must have grown out of a life-long intimacy with Spenser 's poems.

"You deserve the Patronage of better Poems than these though you may lay a more proper claim to these than to any. You having from my childhood tuned mine ears to Spenser's rhymes, entertaining us on winter nights, with that incomparable Piece of his, The Fairy Queen a Poem as richly fraught with divine Morality as Phansy. '^

To More, then, the poet was a noble priest, a conception too unpopular in our own day since the romanticists have taught us to toy with his seductive music alone. More, indeed, was at the other pole. He was one of those quixotic idealists who reared, with pathetic enthusiasm, towers of Babel in a noble but almost fruitless cause. He wrote in the days when men dared to justify the ways of God to man, though he wrote when the doubting Thomases were becoming legion. In the eighteenth century men took to celebrating in song the cotton industry or The Art of Preserving Health. Today some of us have fallen lower and write for "Art's sake." [1]