Philosophy may, as Aristotle avers, begin in wonder, but amours that spring from this emotion, Fulke Greville implies, run the risk of never being consummated. In Greville's Sonnet LVI—an exotic dreamlike vision charged with an erotic potential that, to the great embarrassment of the speaker, remains unrealized—“Cynthia” escapes because of the speaker's naively confident attitude towards experience. Like the dream of St. Jerome, this poem records a crucial moment in Greville's development, for in his subsequent works he systematically repudiates the sublunary, the mutable, and the inherently uncertain: “None can well behold with eyes,” he writes, “But what underneath him lies.”

The couplet, darkly anti-Petrarchan, reverses the ocular orientation of generations of Platonists and implicitly challenges the assumption that objects of cognition comprise a natural hierarchy that leads the eye and mind up Diotima's ladder toward truth. The rhyme, “eyes” and “lies,” provides a peculiarly fitting conclusion for a poem whose author was obsessed with matters epistemological, a poem whose author in his effort to restore traditional modes of cultural coherence anticipates some of the most significant innovations in politics, religion, and literature. Prominent among these innovations was the emergence of a uniquely Protestant epistemology whose new synthesis of old assumptions about what constituted truth and how it could be apprehended informed virtually all of the developing modes of discourse.