- cid
- bafkreictx246q6zfeonmdxkunp3ppoo6iqifhl2dnogyz6xg5ess25rtca
- content_type
- image/jpeg
- filename
- 06_poems_pericles_facsimiles_1905_oxford_page_0037.jpg
- height
- 2400
- key
- pdf-page-1769752318056-0vkblj9gad2d
- ocr_model
- mistral-ocr-latest
- page_number
- 37
- size
- 458043
- text
- 30
# VENUS AND ADONIS
from Spenser's *Astrophel* for one of those with which *Venus* and *Adonis* concludes:—
His pallid face, impictured with death,
She bathed oft with teares, and dried oft:
And with sweet kisses suckt the wasting breath
Out of his lips like lilies pale and soft:
And oft she cald to him, who answered nought,
But onely by his lookes did tell his thought.
Spenser made a second and an undisguised allusion to the legend in the *Faerie Queene*, where he described ‘the dear Adonis’, the paramour of fair Venus, lying
Lapped in flowers and precious spicery
in the fruitful garden called by the name of ‘the wanton boy’. It is in the garden of Adonis that Nature, in Spenser’s allegory, harbours her seeds of life—a philosophical conception which is happily overlooked by Shakespeare.
It is important to note that Spenser ignores the coy modesty of Adonis. It is not a point on which Ovid is quite explicit, and most of his successors leave it uncertain whether Adonis welcomed or rejected Venus’ embraces. In some of these writers’ pages Adonis’ loving ardour, despite his devotion to the chase, is no cooler than that of Venus. Shakespeare diverges further from the Ovidian scheme in making the boy’s impatience of Venus’ advances the pivot of the tale. Two other English poets, Robert Greene and Marlowe, had already seen, albeit dimly, the poetic value of this development of the legend. Robert Greene devoted to the story two lyrics which figured in his prose romances, and in both the boy’s sensitive shyness is brought into prominence. One of these lyrics, in the six-lined stanza of
Robert Greene.
- text_extracted_at
- 2026-01-30T06:12:09.470Z
- text_extracted_by
- ocr-service
- text_has_content
- true
- text_images_count
- 0
- text_source
- ocr
- uploaded
- true
- width
- 1750