Annotations
doubled by...addition grown: There are at least two major sources for theses statements. [6] The first is Shakespeare's allegorical poem, "The Phoenix and the Turtle," which itself derives from a number of literary traditions. Although critics disagree over its meaning, the general subject of the poem is the love and between two birds: the mythological phoenix and the turtle dove. The poem interweaves themes of love, death, and spirtual transcendence through a series of paradoxes and Neoplatonic language. [7] Consider, for instance, lines 25-28:
So they lov'd, as love in twain
Had the essence but in one;
Two distincts, division none:
Number there in love was slain. [8]
Two becomes one, and one, being divisible only by itself, is nothing. Mark Llewellyn views this paradox as a "resolute defiance of numerical logic in favour of spiritual completeness." Two subsequent stanzas (lines 37-44) carry this logic forward:
Property was thus appall'd,
That the self was not the same;
Single nature's double name
Neither two nor one was call'd.
Reason, in itself confounded,
Saw division grow together;
To themselves yet either neither;
Simple were so well compounded,
Llewellyn, speaking about Philips's verse, writes: "Here it is not sublimation so much as multiplication that is at work with the 'doubled' hearts strengthening rather than weakening individual identity."
The second and more immediate source of these lines is John Donne's love poem, "The Exstasie." Philips took the title "Friendship's Mysterys" from line 71, "Loves mysteries in soules doe grow," and the metrical and semantic parallels between the texts will be obvious to the reader: [9]
But as all severall soules containe
Mixture of things, they know not what,
Love, these mixt soules, doth mixe againe,
And makes both one, each this and that.
A single violet transplant,
The strength, the colour, and the size,
(All which before was poore, and scant,)
Redoubles still, and multiplies. (33-40).