Inside Shakespeare’s mind:

Venus and Adonis: the hugely erotic poem

Shakespeare wrote only two narrative poems: Venus and Adonis and the Rape of Lucrece . Both poems are overlooked by scholars and seldom surface for discussion or for debate. One can be classed as a comedy and the other a tr agedy. However, there is a stirring more recently since they have won high praise.

Shakespeare's attitude towards women, have always been negative and whenever he gets the opportunity to crucify them, he does so with vengeance. But there have been a few characters he had spared mercifully for want of merit or if the plays demanded so. The only other worthy poem of his is The Phoenix and Turtle .

Enigmatic but mysterious in their own way and their symbolic union, the birds of the title is presented as mystic and overwhelmingly absurd. Both are lost and completed by their deaths. These are incidents that indicate the Bard's mind running away with imagination.

Venus and Adonis are slammed by many poets including Lord Byron who dismissed it by calling it putrid and the most petrifying, stupidly platonic compositions of the eighteenth century. But to those who favoured clarity over complexities in poetry that were far too obscure, found them pleasant enough to be read. Today, a new light is shed upon his poetry and sonnets.

By contrast Venus and Adonis remains relatively unpopular though it is his best narrative poem. Its genre is difficult for the modern reader to come in terms with. The reader can be disappointed if he expects the power of sincerity and feeling.

Synopsis

The lines in Venus and Adonis differs at large compared to the basic poetry the reader is used to reading on as found on books. Look at the way he introduces these mytical lovers. They are strange bed-fellows from the view of today's writing.

Adonis about to stride his white steed for the chase and is prevented by Venus but when

‘Even as the sun with purple-coloured face; had taken his last leave

of the weeping morn, rose-cheeked Adonis hied him to chase.

Hunting he loved but love he laugh'd to scorn. Sick-thoughted

Venus makes amain unto him and like a bold-fac'd suitor gins to to woo him. Thrice fairer than myself, thus she began

‘The field's chief flower, sweet above compare.

Stain to all nymphs, more lovely than a man; More white and red than doves and rose are. Nature that made thee, with herself at strify Saith than the world hath ending with thy life.

(1-13)

Thus said, Venus attempts to seduce the youth who is interested only in the cause and tries to alight his white steed. She holds him down and implore him to give ear to what she has in her heart, to reveal. As with most of the time Shakespeare who downgrade his women characters, make Venus go down on her knees to beg for love. Venus, the goddess of love says;

‘Vouchsafe, thy wonder to alight thy steed, and rein his proud head to the saddle brow; if thou wilt deign this favour, for thy mood

A thousand honey secrets shalt thou know. Here, come and sit where never serpent hisses.

And being set, I'll smother thee with kisses.

And yet not cloy they lips with loath'd satiety'

(13-19)

In writing Venus and Adonis , Shakespeare opted to deal with mythical figures. Venus is the goddess in love with; Adonis is a beautiful youth out hunting with whom she falls in love with. He declines her advances fighting back her inspirational beauty which stunned him the moment she accosted him. Being firm, he continues to chase the wild boar who turns around and kills him.

Adonis is transformed into a flower. This incident occurs in Ovid's Metamorphose where it releases about seventy five lines but Shakespeare's version takes on a painful 1200 lines. One way to approach Venus and Adonis is to think of this narrative as an exercise in verbal and imaginative ingenuity.

Such a poem is implicitly is about the power imagination and its success is less than a matter of being true to emotion. It is more or less the poet coaxing as much as possible his subject with techniques of elaboration. The reader is taken on a journey to feel the experience which the poet himself is going through.

Not bad for Shakespeare in his role of a poet over his overwhelming power upon as a playwright. Probably, this would have been inside Shakespeare's mind. Shakespeare also changed the story besides making it longer so that Adonis becomes the unwilling partner to Venus’ advances. In conservative England of that times, Shakespeare reverses the roles and make the woman woo making Adonis the hunter, hunted. Sadly this reversal meets Adonis's end when the boar he is hunting, turns and kills him. The poet's versatility thrives on such ironic parallels and inversions, whereas, it could have been the reverse. Venus, deeply hurt and humiliated by his rejection of her love, mourns for him but declares she would have killed Adonis like the boar, given the opportunity.

‘Had I been toothed like him, I must confess,

With kissing I should have kill'd him first’

Though Venus is associated with birds of prey elsewhere, this forms part of a pattern of imagery. Among her pets, eagle, vulture, falcon, Adonis figures as the tame victim, perhaps a debchick or a deer. By any term, this is natural but Shakespeare uses in a way it contributes to the poem's air of conscious artifice in which the sexual comedy is surfaced.

To cite an example when Venus offers herself to Adonis as a luxury bed for him to play upon.

Venus weeps beside his wounded body and see a flower spring from where he bleeds to death. She names it as Adonis Flower. It is a common sight during the summer in England.

‘Within this limit relief enough

Sweet bottom grass and high delightful plain

Round rising hillocks, brakes obscures and rough

To shelter thee from tempest and from rain ......

Adonis is as an unusual kind of comedy that reveals a woman's depression, and the next moment to seek vengeance after being rejected and mercifully a wild boar doing it for her. Such witty eroticism contributes greatly to the authenticity of the plot. At the end of the narrative, she finds solace;

‘By this the boy that by her side lay kill'd

Was melted like a vapour from her sight

And in his blood on the ground lay spill'd

A purple flower sprung up, check'red with white

Resembling well his pale cheeks, and the blood

Which in round drops upon the whiteness stood

She bows her head the new sprung-flower to smell

Comparing it to Adonis's breath and say within her bosom shall dwell...

Adonis flower (wood anemone or windflower), botanical name-Anemone Nemorasa became a much recognized flower in England as a dedication to the fairest of men, the handsome beautiful youth that Venus languished for.