Even as the sun with purple-coloured face
Had ta’en his last leave of the weeping morn,
Rose-cheeked Adonis hied him to the chase;
Hunting he loved, but love he laughed to scorn;
Sick-thoughted Venus makes amain unto him,
And like a bold-faced suitor ’gins to woo him.
“Thrice fairer than myself,” thus she began,
“The field’s chief flower, sweet above compare,
Stained to all nymphs, more lovely than a man,
More white and red than doves or roses are;
Nature that made thee, with herself at strife,
Saith that the world hath ending with thy life.”
“Vouchsafe, thou wonder, to alight thy steed,
And rein his proud head to the saddle-bow;
If thou wilt deign this favour, for thy meed
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 thy lips with loathed satiety,
But rather famish them amid their plenty,
Making them red and pale with fresh variety;
Ten kisses short as one, one long as twenty:
A summer’s day will seem an hour but short,
Being wasted in such time-beguiling sport.”
With this she seizeth on his sweating palm,
The precedent of pith and livelihood,
And trembling in her passion, calls it balm,
Earth’s sovereign salve to do a goddess good:
Being so enraged, desire doth lend her force
Courageously to pluck him from his horse.
Over one arm the lusty courser’s rein,
Under her other was the tender boy,
Who blushed and pouted in a dull disdain,
With leaden appetite, unapt to toy;
She red and hot as coals of glowing fire,
He red for shame, but frosty in desire.
The studded bridle on a ragged bough
Nimbly she fastens:—O, how quick is love!—
The steed is stalled up, and even now
To tie the rider she begins to prove:
Backward she push’d him, as she would be thrust,
And govern’d him in strength, though not in lust.
So soon was she along, as he was down,
Each leaning on their elbows and their hips:
Now doth she stroke his cheek, now doth he frown,
And ’gins to chide, but soon she stops his lips;
And kissing speaks, with lustful language broken,
“If thou wilt chide, thy lips shall never open.”
He burns with bashful shame; she with her tears
Doth quench the maiden burning of his cheeks;
Then with her windy sighs and golden hairs
To fan and blow them dry again she seeks:
He saith she is immodest, blames her miss;
What follows more she murders with a kiss.
Even as an empty eagle, sharp by fast,
Tires with her beak on feathers, flesh, and bone,
Shaking her wings, devouring all in haste,
Till either gorge be stuffed or prey be gone;
Even so she kissed his brow, his cheek, his chin,
And where she ends she doth anew begin.
Forced to content, but never pleased, desire
Is double death to climb in and expire.
(Excerpt from the opening sections of the poem — the full work contains 1,194 lines.)
Originally published in 1593 by William Shakespeare. Public domain.
Analysis
Introduction
Venus and Adonis was William Shakespeare’s first published poem, printed in 1593 with a dedication to Henry Wriothesley, the Earl of Southampton. Written during the London plague closures that temporarily halted theater performance, the poem established Shakespeare as both a dramatist and a poet of sensual intensity. It is an Ovidian narrative poem — erotic, psychological, and mythological — reimagining the tragic love story of the goddess Venus and the mortal Adonis.
Summary of the Poem
The goddess Venus, embodiment of love and desire, pursues the handsome mortal Adonis, who is devoted to hunting and indifferent to passion. Despite her seductions, Adonis resists, preferring the chase of the wild boar to that of love. When he ignores her warnings and joins the hunt, he is gored to death by a boar — an emblem of untamed nature and male recklessness. Venus discovers his lifeless body, mourns him, and decrees that from his blood shall spring the anemone flower, a symbol of love’s transience and grief.
Through this mythic tale, Shakespeare explores the conflict between lust and innocence, body and spirit, power and vulnerability.
Themes and Interpretation
Desire and Resistance: The poem dramatizes the imbalance between Venus’s consuming erotic desire and Adonis’s chastity or disinterest. This reversal of gender roles — a female pursuer and a reluctant male — was striking in the Elizabethan era, giving the poem both comic energy and psychological complexity.
Mortality and Transformation: Adonis’s death marks the inevitable union of love and death that underlies classical myth. His transformation into a flower mirrors Venus’s own transformation from sensuality to sorrow — love evolving into lament.
Nature and Instinct: The natural imagery throughout, from the fiery sun to the wild boar, equates physical passion with elemental force. Love is portrayed as natural yet dangerous — both vital and destructive.
Style and Technique
Shakespeare’s verse is written in six-line stanzas of iambic pentameter with the rhyme scheme ababcc, known as “Venus and Adonis stanzas.” This structure produces a steady rhythm that mirrors the poem’s alternation of desire and restraint.
The language is lush with metaphors, double meanings, and physical imagery. Shakespeare’s sensuous diction — “smother thee with kisses,” “red and hot as coals of glowing fire” — reflects both the vitality and peril of passion.
Venus’s speech is an extraordinary psychological portrait of desire: persuasive, self-contradictory, comic, and tragic all at once. The poem reveals Shakespeare’s early mastery of rhetoric and his fascination with the psychology of love.
Philosophical Vision
Beneath its erotic narrative, Venus and Adonis examines the limits of human control over desire and destiny. Love, in Shakespeare’s view, is not merely pleasure but a cosmic energy — creative and destructive, divine and mortal. Adonis’s refusal of love and his death both affirm the futility of resisting nature’s law. The goddess’s grief transforms sensuality into compassion, suggesting that suffering purifies passion into something spiritual.
Legacy and Influence
Venus and Adonis became one of the most popular poems of the Elizabethan age, reprinted repeatedly during Shakespeare’s lifetime. It established his reputation as a writer of extraordinary imagination and linguistic richness, influencing later poets such as Marlowe, Spenser, and Keats.
In its mixture of myth, sensuality, and tragic irony, the poem anticipates the complexity of Shakespeare’s later dramas. It remains a landmark in English narrative poetry — a work where beauty and mortality, pleasure and pain, are inseparably entwined.