PROTEUS       Say that upon the altar of her beauty

You sacrifice your tears, your sighs, your heart.

Write till your ink be dry, and with your tears

Moist it again, and frame some feeling line,

That may discover such integrity.

For Orpheus’ lute was strung with poets’ sinews,

Whose golden touch could soften steel and stones,

Make tigers tame, and huge leviathans

Forsake unsounded deeps to dance on sands.      (3.2.72-80)

Proteus is now getting into his stride, imagining not what Thurio should say, but what he wishes to say himself. Say that upon the altar of her beauty you sacrifice your tears, your sighs, your heart. She’s a goddess; you’re her votary, you worship her. (Love as idolatry, near blasphemy; not a good sign.) Write till your ink be dry—poem after poem (he’s picturing a montage here)—and with your tears moist it again (a sweet if implausible conceit, solemnly weeping into an inkhorn) and frame some feeling line—compose it from the heart—that may discover such integrity, attesting to your devotion to your goddess. Put yourself on the line! Dredge it out of your very soul!

 For Orpheus’ lute was strung with poets’ sinews—not a pleasant image actually, of dismemberment, anatomisation, a limping procession of hamstrung poets (dismemberment was, after all, Orpheus’ fate, after he lost his wife Eurydice—so, all in all, not a good model at all)—but, then, Orpheus’ golden touch could soften steel and stones, melt even the hardest of hearts, he was such a good poet and musician. He could tame tigers with his songs! And—in a lovely image that teeters over the edge of bathos—make huge leviathans forsake unsounded deeps to dance on sands. Never mind the tigers: his songs made enormous sea monsters emerge from the sea to dance in ecstasy along the beach. Now that was a poet. Poetry: that’s what you need. Ideally, set to music… Girls love that stuff, even more than sea monsters do.