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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 undisgoiised allusion to
the
legend
in
the
Faerie
^leene^
where he
described
Uhe
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
con-
ception 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 O vidian scheme in
making the boy's impatience of Venus' advances the pivot
Robert of the tale. Two other English poets, Robert Greene and
Greene. 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
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