Summary
The poem begins with the image of Adonis hunting in the morning. Venus sees him and immediately pursues him.
By the second stanza of the poem, Venus is already speaking to Adonis and flattering him for being so beautiful. She compares him to a flower and tells him he is the "stain to all nymphs" (9), before promising that if he pauses his hunt momentarily, she will heap affection on him in the form of kisses.
She grabs his hand, pulls him off his horse, and carries him further into the woods, where she eventually tackles him to the ground.
Venus continues her attempt to gain Adonis's affection, but he keeps his lips pursed tightly. When he turns his head away from her kiss, Venus becomes flustered and frustrated. She tells him that even the god of war was not able to resist her, but Adonis is unyielding.
Next, Venus launches into an argument about why Adonis must make use of his youth and beget children while he is still in his prime.
When Adonis speaks for the first time, he simply asks Venus to stop talking so he can return to his hunt.
Offended, Venus tells Adonis that he is not a real man. She begins to cry, and Adonis struggles to escape her grasp. Venus only clutches to him tighter. She tells him to think of himself as a deer and her body as a park for him to traverse.
Analysis
The beginning of Venus and Adonis establishes, first and foremost, the inverted gender dynamic that departs from the original story. In Roman mythology, Adonis is a willing lover of Venus, the goddess of love. However, in Shakespeare's poem, Venus becomes a relentless aggressor while Adonis remains passive and unwilling to return her affections.
As early as the first stanza, the narrator establishes this dynamic, saying, "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" (3-6). Immediately, then, readers are made aware of Adonis's disinterest in love and preference for hunting. Furthermore, Venus is compared to a "bold-faced suitor," suggesting that she occupies the role of a male pursuer, emboldened likely by her power as a goddess.
Notably, the poem moves swiftly through any expository action, thrusting Venus and Adonis together by the end of the first stanza. This fast-paced nature of the poem underscores Venus's "sick-thoughted" mind, a term that denotes Venus's obsession with garnering Adonis's favor. As the beautiful goddess of love, Venus is accustomed to getting what she wants, and the speed with which the poem moves from Adonis alone to Adonis encountering Venus showcases the goddess's familiarity with instant gratification.
This swift action slows, however, when Venus's seduction of Adonis is immediately unsuccessful. Her approach is laden with language of force and violence as she attempts to attain what she is certain she will get. She "seizeth" his hand (25), "pluck[s] him from his horse" (30), and pushes him onto the ground where she "governed him in strength but, though not in lust" (42). Though he does not speak, the narrator highlights Adonis's youth and passivity during these interactions, describing his palm as "sweating" (25), and saying he "blushed and pouted in a dull disdain" as Venus carries him from his horse (33).
Critics have long debated over the tone of these stanzas, some positing that the image of Venus carrying Adonis about the woods is meant to be a comedic interpretation of the original myth. Others, by contrast, argue that this imagery highlights the violence of what is, ultimately, a depiction of sexual assault. While both interpretations merit consideration, it is also important to note that the extreme physicality of these stanzas gives way to dialogue and argumentation that proceeds until the end of the poem. In this way, Shakespeare disrupts Venus's godly force with the need for logic, rhetoric, and persuasion, ultimately signifying the primacy of language over physical force in a seduction scenario.
