Venus and Adonis

Alliteration is the repetition of nearby (usually consonant) sounds. Shakespeare uses this device many times in this long poem, but a few examples will show how it typically works. After Adonis’s horse chases the mare, he is disappointed when she plays hard to get, and the stallion is described as “like a melancholy malcontent” (Line 313). Adonis is upset too, and he chides his horse for running off, “Banning his boist’rous and unruly beast” (Line 326). (“Banning” means cursing.) Following Adonis’s cruel death, Venus says that in the future, love “shall be fickle, false, and full of fraud” (Line 1141).

In a simile, which can often be recognized by the introductory words “like” or “as,” one thing is compared to a different thing in a way that brings out a similarity between them. Shakespeare employs numerous similes in this poem, many of them drawn from nature. Here are a few notable ones, but there are many more.

The shy Adonis is “Like a dive-dapper peering through a wave, Who being look’d on, / ducks as quickly in” (Lines 85-86). A dive-dapper is a small grebe, a water bird. (Adonis reluctantly agrees to let Venus kiss him, but when it comes to it, he closes his eyes and turns away.) Later, Adonis is again compared to a bird, as he becomes too tired to resist Venus’s amorous advances: “Hot, faint, and weary, with her hard embracing, / Like a wild bird being tam’d with too much handling” (Lines 559-60). Two more similes follow immediately: “Or as the silver-foot roe that’s tir’d with chasing, / Or like the froward infant still’d with dandling” (Lines 561-62). All the similes compare Adonis to another living creature that has been mastered in some way by another. (“Froward” means fretful.)

Not long after this, just when Venus thinks that she and Adonis are finally about to make love, she is disappointed by his refusal. Her disappointment is conveyed in a lengthy and ingenious simile:

Even so, poor birds, deceiv'd with painted grapes,

Do surfeit by the eye and pine the maw,

Even so she languisheth in her mishaps,

As those poor birds that helpless berries saw (Lines 601-04).

In a conventional simile, Venus’s eyes are compared to the sun (Lines 482-83), but the related simile that follows in the next stanza, about the goddess’s tearful eyes, is more unusual. Her eyes, “which through the crystal tears gave light, / Shone like the moon in water seen by night” (Lines 491-92).

One of the most engaging similes features a snail. When Venus stumbles upon Adonis’s corpse, she immediately averts her eyes:

…as the snail, whose tender horns being hit,

Shrinks backward in his shelly cave with pain,

And there, all smother’d up in shade, doth sit,

Long after fearing to creep forth again;

So at his bloody view her eyes are fled

Into the deep-dark cabins of her head (Lines 1033-38).

A metaphor resembles a simile, but there is a difference. In a metaphor, an object, quality, or action is explicitly identified with another thing rather than, as in a simile, being compared to it. The poem features a number of extended metaphors. At one point, Venus tells Adonis that she will make her body a park, and she invites him, as a deer, to enjoy himself in it. The two stanzas that convey the metaphor are full of erotic imagery:

‘Fondling,’ she saith, ‘since I have hemm’d thee here

Within the circuit of this ivory pale,

I’ll be a park, and thou shalt be my deer;

Feed where thou wilt, on mountain or in dale;

Graze on my lips, and if those hills be dry,

Stray lower, where the pleasant fountains lie.

‘Within this limit is relief enough,

Sweet bottom grass and high delightful plain,

Round rising hillocks, brakes 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’ (Lines 229-40).

In another extended metaphor, the erotic act of kissing is presented in decidedly non-erotic fashion as a business deal to which both parties assent. Using language of buying and selling, sealing (as in a contract), and debt and payment, Venus speaks:

Pure lips, sweet seals in my soft lips imprinted,

What bargains may I make, still to be sealing?

To sell myself I can be well contented,

So thou wilt buy, and pay, and use good dealing,

Which purchase if thou make, for fear of slips,

Set thy seal-manual on my wax-red lips.

A thousand kisses buys my heart from me;

And pay them at thy leisure, one by one.

What is ten hundred touches unto thee?

Are they not quickly told and quickly gone?

Say, for non-payment that the debt should double,

Is twenty hundred kisses such a trouble? (Lines 511-22).