Summary
After Venus entreats Adonis to explore her body as if it is a park and he a deer, Adonis pries her arms apart and releases himself from her grasp.
Just as he is about to mount his horse to gallop away, a mare runs by. Adonis's horse, excited by the mare, takes off after her. The mare, at first, is wary of the horse, but she is eventually won over by him and "[grows] kinder" at the sight of his excitement (317). Adonis attempts to calm his horse, but the horse runs away with the mare, leaving Adonis by himself.
Venus finds Adonis once more, and gently takes his hand. He continues to look at her with disdain and unwillingness while she continues to flatter him.
Adonis begs Venus to let him go so that he can find his horse, but Venus argues that Adonis should use the horse as an example and concede to her. Adonis counters her argument by saying that one cannot pick fruit before it is ripe, referring once more to his youth.
When Adonis looks at Venus with contempt once more, she faints.
Adonis attempts to wake her by touching her nose, hitting her cheeks, and bending her fingers.
Thinking that he has actually killed her, Adonis is overwhelmed with guilt, and he decides to kiss her for the first time.
Analysis
A large portion of this section of the poem features a detailed description of Adonis's horse and his pursuit of the mare that runs by him. Shakespeare dedicates 11 stanzas to the encounter between the horse and the mare, underscoring its significance as a reverse-analogy for the relationship between Venus and Adonis.
When the mare first appears, Adonis's horse undergoes a dramatic transformation: "Imperiously he leaps, he neighs, he bounds, / And now his woven girths he breaks assunder; The bearing earth with his hard hoof he wounds, / Whose hollow womb resounds like heaven's thunder; / The iron bit he crusheth 'tween his teeth, / Controlling what he was controlled with" (265-270). Here, the narrator describes the horse as furiously breaking free of the instruments that bind him, suggesting that the sight of the mare – and thus the instinctual desire for sex – has upended the relationship between the horse and his master.
This passage also inspires Venus's argument that follows, as she says, "How like a jade he stood, tied to the tree, / Servilely mastered with a leathern rein! / But when he saw his love, his youth's fair fee, / He held such petty bondage in disdain" (391-394). Here, Venus reminds Adonis of the way the horse broke free of his bindings in order to suggest that love is so powerful it can completely transform someone and even grant one a sense of total freedom. In this way, the episode between the mare and the horse comes to represent the natural order of the world, and it aids Venus's argument that to resist sexual gratification is fundamentally unnatural and, in the case of Adonis, unmanly.
While Venus makes this argument, the poem itself does not necessarily endorse it. Instead, Adonis offers his own counterargument, saying, "Who wears a garment shapeless and unfinished? / Who plucks the bud before one leaf put forth? / If springing things be any jot diminished, / They wither in their prime, prove nothing worth" (415-418). Here, Adonis once again reminds Venus – and the reader – of his youth, arguing that having sex too soon would prevent him from growing or reproducing a strong bloodline.
This quotation represents the fundamental difference in perspective between Venus and Adonis: Venus sees Adonis's beauty as evidence that he is in his prime, and believes that he should capitalize on that youth by engaging in love and procreation. By contrast, Adonis sees himself as a young boy who must grow to know himself better before he can develop an interest in love or sex. Through their dialogue, the poem ultimately raises the question of whether erotic desire is a natural part of one's youth, or whether it ushers in the end of that youth altogether and should be delayed.
