Summary
Venus, attempting to convince Adonis to stay and not hunt the boar, once again resorts to flirtation and flattery. She argues that he must stay and be "prodigal" (755) so as not to "bury [his] posterity" in his own, unused body (758).
Adonis, now frustrated and annoyed, tells Venus that what she feels for him is not actually love, but lust.
Without waiting for her reply, Adonis tears himself away from Venus and leaves. Venus chases after him, but loses sight of him in the darkness.
Venus spends the night crying and singing a lament for her love.
When the lark begins singing in the morning, Venus knows she must search for Adonis. She hears his hounds and immediately moves toward their cries.
She realizes the hunt for the boar has begun, and soon after encounters the boar itself. Adonis's hounds are wounded and crying, and the sight of them causes Venus to begin chiding death.
She scolds death for its unfair nature, noting that while it aims to overtake only the sick and feeble, it also "cleaves an infant's heart" (942). She wonders aloud whether death drinks tears because she is crying so much. Venus continues crying until she hears a man scream.
Analysis
This section of the poem features one of Adonis's longest speeches. Indeed, Venus's speech dominates the poem in much the same way she seeks to dominate Adonis himself. Here, however, Adonis is made angry by Venus's return to language of eroticism and desire. "Call it not love," he finally says to her, "for Love to heaven is fled / Since sweating Lust on earth usurped his name, / Under whose simple semblance he hath fed / Upon fresh beauty, blotting it with blame; / Which the hot tyrant stains and soon bereaves, / As caterpillars do the tender leaves" (793-798).
Here, Adonis no longer urges Venus to remember his youth, but instead attacks her desire itself, calling it lust instead of love. The image of lust he provides is one of a usurping ruler, or someone who attains a powerful station by force or illegal means. This image is significant because it mirrors Venus's own attempted "conquering" of Adonis from earlier in the poem. While the narrator equates Venus with love itself, referring to her as "Love" multiple times in the poem, Adonis's portrayal of a forceful usurper suggests that to him, the goddess of love is actually the human incarnation of lust.
It is notable that Venus does not have a chance to reply to Adonis's argument. Instead, Adonis leaves and Venus begins weeping and singing a sad lament, suggesting that Venus was not actually attempting to seduce Adonis but instead keeping him from the perilous hunt. Her behavior serves to challenge Adonis's assertion that her feelings stem only from lust rather than love.
When Venus realizes that Adonis has begun his hunt, she expresses her sadness by chiding death. "Thy mark is feeble age," she says to death, "but thy false dart / Mistakes that aim and cleaves an infant's heart" (941-942). This unsettling imagery is, on one hand, a mark of Venus's hyperbolic expression of grief, for she does not yet know if Adonis is dead. On the other hand, her chiding death takes on a markedly maternal tone. In so doing, Venus expresses love and concern for Adonis rather than lustful desire.
This section of the poem is marked by Venus's painful and unrelenting solitude; the narrator spends multiple stanzas describing her beating her own breast while tears flow from her eyes. This image of female lament is reminiscent of classical depictions of grief, specifically Hecuba's grief over the murder of her children in the play Hecuba by Euripides. Again, Venus's pain is characterized by allusions to maternity and maternal lament – allusions that ultimately challenge Adonis's perception of Venus as merely a lustful woman.
