From thy fair face I learn, O my loved lord,
    That which no mortal tongue can rightly say;
     The soul imprisoned in her house of clay,
    Holpen by thee, to God hath often soared. 
  And though the vulgar, vain, malignant horde
    Attribute what their grosser wills obey,
    Yet shall this fervent homage that I pay,
    This love, this faith, pure joys for us afford. 
  Lo, all the lovely things we find on earth,
    Resemble for the soul that rightly sees
    That source of bliss divine which gave us birth: 
  Nor have we first-fruits or remembrances
    Of heaven elsewhere.  Thus, loving loyally,
    I rise to God, and make death sweet by thee.

We know that, in some way or other, perhaps during those early years at Florence among the members of the Platonic Academy, Michelangelo absorbed the doctrines of the Phoedrus and Symposium.  His poems abound in references to the contrast between Uranian and Pandemic, celestial and vulgar, Eros.  We have even one sonnet in which he distinctly states the Greek opinion that the love of women is unworthy of a soul bent upon high thoughts and virile actions.  It reads like a verse transcript from the main argument of the Symposium:—­

  Love is not always harsh and deadly sin,
    When love for boundless beauty makes us pine;
    The heart, by love left soft and infantine,
    Will let the shafts of God’s grace enter in. 
  Love wings and wakes the soul, stirs her to win
    Her flight aloft, nor e’er to earth decline;
    ’Tis the first step that leads her to the shrine
    Of Him who slakes the thirst that burns within.

  The love of that whereof I speak ascends: 
    Woman is different far; the love of her
    But ill befits a heart manly and wise. 
  The one love soars, the other earthward tends;
    The soul lights this, while that the senses stir;
    And still lust’s arrow at base quarry flies.

The same exalted Platonism finds obscure but impassioned expression in this fragment of a sonnet (No. lxxix.):——­

  For Love’s fierce wound, and for the shafts that harm,
    True medicine ’twould have been to pierce my heart;
    But my soul’s Lord owns only one strong charm,
    Which makes life grow where grows life’s mortal smart. 
  My Lord dealt death, when with his-powerful arm
    He bent Love’s bow.  Winged with that shaft, from Love
    An angel flew, cried, “Love, nay Burn!  Who dies,
    Hath but Love’s plumes whereby to soar above! 
  Lo, I am He who from thine earliest years
    Toward, heaven-born Beauty raised thy faltering eyes. 
    Beauty alone lifts live man to heaven’s spheres."

Feeling like this, Michelangelo would have been justly indignant with officious relatives and critics, who turned his amici into animi, redirected his Cavalieri letters to the address of Vittoria Colonna, discovered Florence in Febo di Poggio, and ascribed all his emotional poems to some woman.