Apart from the fact that the hymns to love and to beauty were written early in Spenser's career and their "heavenlie" counterparts much later, scholars offer little to explain the dissatisfaction that one of the author's patrons expressed toward the earlier poems, which are in no way offensive except perhaps in focusing upon the sublunary world. The new poems do not share this fault, but all four poems are quite consistent with the neo-Platonic philosophy that was growing in popularity in Elizabethan England. According to this doctrine, the material world is only a pale reflection of the ideal world, and mortals gradually, through growth from infancy to old age, unfold the many-dimensioned wholeness of their being that exists in eternity. - Summary by T. A. Copeland