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Venus and Adonis

Shakespeare’s most endearing poem:

Gwen HERAT

Shakespeare has never been popular for his poems (or prose) like his countryman poet William Wordsworth not because they were less poignant but for the fact that his plays were so dramatically overpowering.

Lord Byron dismissed his poems calling them ‘the most puling, petrifying, stupidly platonic, compositions’. But he have an impetus to prose as texts, placed it on a pedestal for what it is today. We have seen the year 1592 as the period that Shakespeare abandoned the stage to write poetry.

The immediate results were the two narrative poems, Venus and Adonis and The Rape of Lucrece. Possibly the earliest of his sonnets may have been written during this time. When Lord Byron made these remarks, it was the 18th century which favoured clarity over complexity. The public found them too obscure.

By contrast the narrative poems remain unpopular due to their genre. For instance, even today the modern reader finds it difficult to come to terms with Venus and Adonis. I find it myself. May be due what we all expect; power, sincerity, feeling, etc. of which we all are disappointed with. Sometimes, I wonder is this the Shakespeare I know? the iconic genius of English literature;

Shakespeare had his share of love for mythology. He employs that feelings into Venus and Adonis and deals with the mythical figures of gods and goddesses. Venus is the goddess of love. Adonis is a beautiful youth out hunting and she falls in love with him. He turns down her advances and continue his hunt and is chased by a wild boar. He is transformed into a beautiful flower.

‘Affection is a coal that must be cooled,
Else suffered, it will set the heart on fire.
The sea hath bounds, but deep desire hath none’.
Lines 387-389

Shakespeare had relied on Ovid’s Melamorphose for the plot of the story which consisted about seventy five lines but the Bard’s version stretches to nearly one thousand two hundred lines. One has to think of it as an exercise in verbal and imaginative ingenuity to approach. It is matter of being less in emotion than in reality.

The poet coaxes his readers to notice what he is doing. Sometimes, Shakespeare can be a fanatic, removed from the hero-worshipping we do in the name of drama. Shakespeare changes the story besides making it long so that Adonis becomes the unwilling object of Venus’s attention.

Here, the roles are reversed so that the woman woos and Adonis the hunter becomes the hunted. Adonis meets his end with yet another reverse; The boar he is hunting turns around and kills him.

The poem revels on such ironic parallels and inversions. Mouring Adoni’s death, venus overtaken by emotion, cries and admits that she would have killed Adonis like the boar, given the chance. Here, again we find Shakespeare injecting passion and fury even in the heart of a godess.

‘Had I been tooth’d like the boar, given the chance

With kissing should have kill’d him first’.

Venus is normally associated with birds of prey, especially with eagle, vulture, falcon etc. and this forms part of her imagery.

Adonis is featured like a tame, innocent victim like a dear in flight. In a sense, this is an unusual imagery but is relevant to the poem’s air of conscious in which the sexual comedy is played out. For example when Venus offers herself to Adonis as a park for him to play upon.

‘Within this limit’s relief enough
Sweet bottom grass and high delightful plain
Round rising hillocks, breaks obscure and rough
To shelter thee from tempest and from rain.
Then be my deer, since I am such a park,
No dog shall rouse thee, though a thousand bark’

(l.235-40)

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