Venus and Adonis Literary Elements

The poem features a third-person narrator who describes the emotions and actions of both Venus and Adonis. However, the majority of the poem is dominated by dialogue between the two characters, placing emphasis on their particular arguments rather than on the action of the narrative.

The poem features 199 stanzas written in sesta rima, or a quatrain and a couplet with the rhyme scheme ABABCC. The predominant meter of the poem is iambic pentameter.

Simile: "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" (55-60).

Here, the narrator compares Venus to a ravenous bird of prey as she attempts to seduce Adonis, highlighting her insatiable desire for him and animalistic instincts.

Metaphor: "Look how a bird lies tangled in a net, / So fastened in her arms Adonis lies" (67-68).

In this metaphor, the narrator likens Adonis to a captured and powerless bird. This description emphasizes Adonis's passivity and innocence amid Venus's advances.

Metaphor: "Full gentle now she takes him by the hand, / A lily prisoned in a gaol of snow, / Or ivory in an alabaster band" (361-363).

Here, the narrator describes the image of Adonis's hand in Venus's hand as two similar and beautiful things, but highlights the way that Adonis's hand is being held there against his will.

Simile: "Hot, faint and weary, with her hard embracing, / Like a wild bird being tamed with too much handling" (559-560).

This quotation compares Adonis, once again, to a bird. However, the narrator suggests that Adonis has been wearied by Venus's persistence, and is now too tired to resist her.

Shakespeare makes frequent use of alliteration and assonance in the poem. The sesta rima stanza form dictates multiple rhymes that appear both at the ends of lines and within them. Alliteration, too, serves to highlight the tragic and dramatic elements of the Venus and Adonis narrative. Lines like "With this she seizeth on his sweating palm" (25), "like a melancholy malcontent" (313), and "Sometimes he scuds far off and there he stares; / Anon he starts stirring of a feather" (301-302) emphasize the drama of the interactions between the two main characters. Notably, it is the narrator (not Venus or Adonis) who makes more use of alliteration and assonance, heightening the intensity of the conversation they share with rhythmic and descriptive commentary.

The central irony of the poem derives from Shakespeare's inversion of the power dynamic from the original Roman myth. Rather than subscribe to the narrative that Adonis was a willing lover of Venus, Shakespeare's poem depicts Adonis as a boy uninterested in love and desire altogether while Venus is insatiable, aggressive, and at times violent.

Narrative poem

The poem takes place in an unspecified wooded area, hearkening back to the pastoral tradition and maintaining close focus on the interactions between Venus and Adonis.

The tone of the poem shifts frequently. It is sometimes romantic, sometimes erotic, and sometimes ironic. By the end of the poem however, the tone is notably tragic as Venus mourns the death of Adonis.

There is no explicit protagonist or antagonist in the poem. It could be argued that Venus and Adonis are both protagonists in their own ways, and the wild boar is the antagonist because of the way it threatens Adonis's life.

The central conflict of the poem is one that Shakespeare himself invented. Venus harbors an insatiable desire for Adonis, but Adonis has no interest in her or love altogether. Their encounter in the woods is characterized by a series of arguments over whether Adonis should dispel with his boyish innocence and focus on procreation.

The climax of the poem comes when Venus is searching for Adonis after hearing a man scream. She does not yet know that he is dead, and once she discovers his body, she falls into a mad state in which she declares that all lovers will suffer for their love in the future.

The poem foreshadows Adonis's death by using references to flowers throughout his arguments with Venus. When Adonis dies, a purple flower sprouts from his spilled blood on the ground, signifying for Venus that Adonis lives on through that flower.

The poem does not feature many instances of understatement due to its dramatic and emotionally heightened nature.

There are surprisingly few literary or classical allusions present in Venus and Adonis, an element of the poem that serves to maintain tight focus specifically on their arguments with one another. However, Venus makes references to other figures from antiquity, including Narcissus (who was so beautiful he fell in love with his own reflection), and Jove, whom she speaks to at the end of the poem as she assures herself that Adonis is not dead.

The poem uses metonymy often to describe Venus. Rather than refer to her by name, the narrator refers to her as "Love," substituting her predominant attribute for her identity. Examples include "[He] leaves Love upon her back deeply distressed" (814) and "She's Love, she loves, and yet she is not loved" (610).

Personification comes frequently in the form of the pathetic fallacy, or the attribution of human emotions to non-human natural entities. Venus argues that various elements of nature were gladdened by Adonis's presence while he was still alive, imbuing things like fish and birds with the human capacity for joy. The boar, too, is personified as a malevolent villain until Venus convinces herself that it was, like her, also in love with Adonis – all perceptions of the boar that personify it as something other than animal.

Venus's character is herself a hyperbole: as a goddess who has simply taken a human form, she is more powerful than Adonis and, the poem suggests, experiences emotion in more severe ways. Her attempted seductions of Adonis are characterized by exaggerated efforts – from physically tackling him to the ground to speaking in explicitly erotic terms. Finally, her grief for Adonis takes the form of a hyperbolic decree that lovers will suffer for all eternity. In this way, the hyperbole associated with her character underscores the erratic, unpredictable, and severe experience of love itself, with which Venus is frequently equated.

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