The beloved may possess a natural form matching what was pictured in imagination, or inferior to it, or superior to it. The beloved may have no form and may not admit forms. This lover then gives form, from hearing, to what cannot be given form. In picturing what does not admit form, nature intends only to gather around a delimited affair it can hold, fearing dispersion and attachment to something of which it possesses nothing.
This is what prompts the picturing we mentioned of one who is not a form, or of one whose form has not been witnessed even though he possesses a form. Love’s action in this form is to magnify its figure until the place of imagination becomes too narrow for it, as it appears to him. The greatness and magnitude within that form produce emaciation in the lover’s body. For this reason lovers’ bodies become emaciated: nourishment is diverted to it (the beloved’s form), so it grows, while nourishment for the body diminishes and it wastes away. The burning of longing consumes it, leaving nothing for the body to feed upon. In that burning the beloved’s form grows within imagination, for this is its food. The form-giving faculty then clothes that form in imagination with surpassing beauty and radiant loveliness. Because of that beauty, the lover’s outward form changes: his color yellows, his lip withers, and his eye sinks. That faculty then clothes the form with immense strength, taking it from the strength of the lover’s body. The lover becomes weak in his powers, his flesh trembling.
