"The Metaphysical Amorist" by J.V. Cunningham

Topics discussed in this episode include:

 -The "Plain Style" 
-Epigrams
-"Stoner" by John Williams 
-Stanzaic asymmetricity 
-Wacky rhyme schemes as evidence of revision 
-Stanzaic palindromes 
-The triplet as the couplet of couplets 
-Ladies (feminine endings) last 
-The curious case of iambic tetrameter 
-A gloss of glose 
-Plato, the worst third-wheel ever, returns 
-Earthy kids 
-"Love" as heuristic 
-Western love poets as pseudo-incels 
-Christianity is Platonism for the masses 
-Do we ever really know the ones we love? 
-Plato gets dumped, again 
-Hume slides in the DMs, gets curved 
-Duns Scotus lookin like a snack tho 
-Scotistic realism 
-Plato's epistemology in the Theaetetus 
-Amor Vincit Philosophia 

Text of the poem: 

The Metaphysical Amorist

You are the problem I propose, 
my dear, the text my musings glose: 
I call you for convenience love. 
By definition you’re a cause 
inferred by necessary laws— 
you are so to the saints above. 

But in this shadowy lower life 
I sleep with a terrestrial wife 
and earthy children I beget. 
Love is a fiction I must use, 
a privilege I can abuse, 
and sometimes something I forget. 

Now, in the heavenly other place 
Love is in the eternal mind 
the luminous form whose shade she is 
a ghost discarnate, thought defined. 
She was so to my early bliss, 
she is so while I comprehend 
the form my senses apprehend, 
and in the end she will be so. 

Her whom my hands embrace I kiss, 
her whom my mind infers I know. 
The one exists in time and space 
and as she was she will not be; 
The other is in her own grace 
and is She is eternally. 

Plato! you shall not plague my life. 
I married a terrestrial wife. 
And Hume! She is not mere sensation 
in sequence of observed relation. 
She has two forms— ah, thank you, Duns!— 
I know her in both ways at once. 
I knew her, yes, before I knew her, 
and by both means I must construe her, 
and none among you shall undo her.