Venus And Adonis Quotes

Ten kisses short as one, one long as twenty.

Fondling,' she saith, 'since I have hemm'd thee here Within the circuit of this ivory pale, I'll be a park, and thou shalt be my deer; Feed where thou wilt, on mountain or in dale: Graze on my lips, and if those hills be dry, Stray lower, where the pleasant fountains lie.

Dismiss your vows, your feigned tears, your flattery, for where a heart is hard they make no battery.

She’s Love, she loves, and yet she is not lov’d.

Bid me discourse, I will enchant thine ear

Thus weary of the world, away she hies, And yokes her silver doves; by whose swift aid Their mistress mounted through the empty skies In her light chariot quickly is convey'd; Holding their course to Paphos, where their queen Means to immure herself and not be seen.

O, learn to love, the lesson is but plain, And once made perfect, never lost again.

All love's pleasure shall not match its woe.

Had I no eyes but ears, my ears would love. That inward beauty and invisible; Or were I deaf, thy outward parts would move each part in me that were but sensible: Though neither eyes nor ears, to hear nor see, yet should I be in love by touching thee. 'Say, that the sense of feeling were bereft me, and that I could not see, nor hear, nor touch, and nothing but the very smell were left me, yet would my love to thee be still as much; for from the stillitory of thy face excelling comes breath perfum'd that breedeth love by smelling.

Things growing to themselves are growth's abuse: Seeds spring from seeds and beauty breedeth beauty;

My love to love is love but to disgrace it, For I have heard it is a life in death, That laughs and weeps, and all but with a breath.

Love is a spirit all compact of fire, Not gross to sink, but light, and will aspire.

Affection is a coal that must be cool’d, Else suffer’d it will set the heart on fire.

The tender spring upon thy tempting lip Shows thee unripe; yet mayst thou well be tasted: Make use of time, let not advantage slip; Beauty within itself should not be wasted: Fair flowers that are not gather'd in their prime Rot and consume themselves in little time.

What is thy body but a swallowing grave, Seeming to bury that posterity Which, by the rights of time, thou needs must have If thou destroy them not in dark obscurity? If so, the world will hold thee in disdain, Sith in thy pride so fair a hope is slain.

What though the rose have prickles, yet 'tis pluck'd.

EVEN as the sun with purple-colour'd face Had ta'en his last leave of the weeping morn, Rose-cheek'd Adonis tried him to the chase; Hunting he lov'd, but love he laugh'd to scorn;

Graze on my lips, and if those hills be dry, Stray lower, where the pleasant fountains lie.

Venus and Adonis is a spectacular display of Shakespeare’s signature characteristic, his astonishing capacity to be everywhere and nowhere, to assume all positions and to slip free of all constraints. The capacity depends upon a simultaneous, deeply paradoxical achievement of proximity and distance, intimacy and detachment.

Who sees his true-love in her naked bed, Teaching the sheets a whiter hue than white, But when his glutton eye so full hath fed, His other agents aim at like delight? Who is so faint that dare not be so bold To touch the fire, the weather being cold?

I know not love' quoth he, 'nor will not know it, Unless it be a boar, and then I chase it. 'Tis much to borrow, and I will not owe it. My love to love is love but to disgrace it; For I have heard it is a life in death, That laughs and weeps, and all but with a breath.

One sweet kiss shall pay this countless debt.

For where Love reigns, disturbing Jealousy Doth call himself Affection's sentinel; Gives false alarms, suggesteth mutiny, And in a peaceful hour doth cry 'Kill, kill!

He kisses her, and she by her good will / Will never rise, so he will kiss her still.

Before I know myself, seek not to know me

Vilia miretur vulgus; mihi flavus Apollo Pocula Castalia plena ministret aqua. — Venus & Adonis, May 1593

Fie, fie, fond love, thou art so full of fear As one with treasure laden, hemm’d with thieves; Trifles, unwitnessed with eye or ear, Thy coward heart with false bethinking grieves.

Here come and sit, where never serpent hisses; And being set, I ’ll smother thee with kisses; "And yet not cloy thy lips with loath’d satiety, But rather famish them amid their plenty, Making them red and pale with fresh variety -- Ten kisses short as one, one long as twenty: A summer’s day will seem an hour but short, Being wasted in such time-beguiling sport.

O hard-believing love, how strange it seems! Not to believe, and yet too credulous: Thy weal and woe are both of them extremes; Despair and hope make thee ridiculous: The one doth flatter thee in thoughts unlikely, In likely thoughts the other kills thee quickly.

Wonder of time,' quoth she, 'this is my spite, That, thou being dead, the day should yet be light. 'Since thou art dead, lo, here I prophesy: Sorrow on love hereafter shall attend: It shall be waited on with jealousy, Find sweet beginning, but unsavoury end, Ne'er settled equally, but high or low, That all love's pleasure shall not match his woe. 'It shall be fickle, false and full of fraud, Bud and be blasted in a breathing-while; The bottom poison, and the top o'erstraw'd With sweets that shall the truest sight beguile: The strongest body shall it make most weak, Strike the wise dumb and teach the fool to speak. 'It shall be sparing and too full of riot, Teaching decrepit age to tread the measures; The staring ruffian shall it keep in quiet, Pluck down the rich, enrich the poor with treasures; It shall be raging-mad and silly-mild, Make the young old, the old become a child. 'It shall suspect where is no cause of fear; It shall not fear where it should most mistrust; It shall be merciful and too severe, And most deceiving when it seems most just; Perverse it shall be where it shows most toward, Put fear to valour, courage to the coward. 'It shall be cause of war and dire events, And set dissension 'twixt the son and sire; Subject and servile to all discontents, As dry combustious matter is to fire: Sith in his prime Death doth my love destroy, They that love best their loves shall not enjoy.

In night,” quoth she, “desire sees best of all.

Give me one kiss, I'll give it thee again / And one for int'rest, if thou wilt have twain.

Through his mane and tail the high wind sings, fanning the hairs, who wave like feather'd wings.

Love-matches, my dear, are foolish things. I know not how you will find it some time hence: No general rule, however, without exceptions, you know. Violent Love on one side, is enough in conscience, if the other be not a fool, or ungrateful: The Lover and Lovée make generally the happiest couple. Mild, sedate convenience, is better than a stark staring-mad passion. The wall-climbers, the hedge and ditchleapers, the river-forders, the window-droppers, always find reason to think so. Who ever hears of darts, flames, Cupids, Venus’s, Adonis’s, and suchlike nonsense, in matrimony? — Passion is transitory; but discretion, which never bois over, gives durable  happiness.

An oven that is stopp’d, or river stay’d, Burneth more hotly, swelleth with more rage: So of concealed sorrow may be said; Free vent of words love’s fire doth assuage; But when the heart’s attorney once is mute, The client breaks, as desperate in his suit.

Hard-favored tyrant, ugly, meager, lean, Hateful divorce of love,' thus chides she death. 'Grim-grinning ghost, earth's worm, what dost thou mean To stifle beauty and to steal his breath, Who, when he lived, his breath and beauty set Gloss on the rose, smell to the violet?

You’re either a figure for fucking or a fucking freak. Everyone needs a one-and-only after a while. I’m twenty-two, Zuky-do. Middle aged! A Venus must ’ave an Adonis. Even if it’s just for a while. Bronzed, rippling, adoring, preferably, compliant, essentially. Someone to come home to, to cook a pease pudding for of a winter’s night. Look at the facts.

Touch but my lips with those fair lips of thine,-- Though mine be not so fair, yet are they red-- The kiss shall be thine own as well as mine. What seest thou in the ground? hold up thy head: Look in mine eye-balls, there thy beauty lies; Then why not lips on lips, since eyes in eyes? 'Art thou ashamed to kiss? then wink again, And I will wink; so shall the day seem night; Love keeps his revels where they are but twain; Be bold to play, our sport is not in sight: These blue-vein'd violets whereon we lean Never can blab, nor know not what we mean. 'The tender spring upon thy tempting lip Shows thee unripe; yet mayst thou well be tasted: Make use of time, let not advantage slip; Beauty within itself should not be wasted: Fair flowers that are not gather'd in their prime Rot and consume themselves in little time.

A sixteenth-century poet, especially one who knew that he ought to be a curious and universal scholar, would possess some notions, perhaps not strictly philosophical, about the origin of the world and its end, the eduction of forms from matter, and the relation of such forms to the higher forms which are the model of the world and have their being in the mind of God. He might well be a poet to brood on those great complementary opposites: the earthly and heavenly cities, unity and multiplicity, light and dark, equity and justice, continuity--as triumphantly exhibited in his own Empress--and ends--as sadly exhibited in his own Empress. Like St. Augustine he will see mutability as the condition of all created things, which are immersed in time. Time, he knows, will have a stop--perhaps, on some of the evidence, quite soon. Yet there is other evidence to suggest that this is not so. It will seem to him, at any rate, that his poem should in part rest on some poetic generalization-some fiction--which reconciles these opposites, and helps to make sense of the discords, ethical, political, legal, and so forth, which, in its completeness, it had to contain. This may stand as a rough account of Spenser's mood when he worked out the sections of his poem which treat of the Garden of Adonis and the trial of Mutability, the first dealing with the sempiternity of earthly forms, and the second with the dilation of being in these forms under the shadow of a final end. Perhaps the refinements upon, and the substitutes for, Augustine's explanations of the first matter and its potentialities, do not directly concern him; as an allegorist he may think most readily of these potentialities in a quasi-Augustinian way as seeds, seminal reasons, plants tended in a seminarium. But he will distinguish, as his commentators often fail to do, these forms or formulae from the heavenly forms, and allow them the kind of immortality that is open to them, that of athanasia rather than of aei einai. And an obvious place to talk about them would be in the discussion of love, since without the agency represented by Venus there would be no eduction of forms from the prime matter. Elsewhere he would have to confront the problem of Plato's two kinds of eternity; the answer to Mutability is that the creation is deathless, but the last stanzas explain that this is not to grant them the condition of being-for-ever.

Fragment of the Elegy on the Death of Adonis Prom the Greek of Bion Published by Forman, "Poetical Works of P. B. S.", 1876. I mourn Adonis dead—loveliest Adonis— Dead, dead Adonis—and the Loves lament. Sleep no more, Venus, wrapped in purple woof— Wake violet-stoled queen, and weave the crown Of Death,—'tis Misery calls,—for he is dead. The lovely one lies wounded in the mountains, His white thigh struck with the white tooth; he scarce Yet breathes; and Venus hangs in agony there. The dark blood wanders o'er his snowy limbs, His eyes beneath their lids are lustreless, The rose has fled from his wan lips, and there That kiss is dead, which Venus gathers yet. A deep, deep wound Adonis... A deeper Venus bears upon her heart. See, his beloved dogs are gathering round— The Oread nymphs are weeping—Aphrodite With hair unbound is wandering through the woods, 'Wildered, ungirt, unsandalled—the thorns pierce Her hastening feet and drink her sacred blood. Bitterly screaming out, she is driven on Through the long vales; and her Assyrian boy, Her love, her husband, calls—the purple blood From his struck thigh stains her white navel now, Her bosom, and her neck before like snow. Alas for Cytherea—the Loves mourn— The lovely, the beloved is gone!—and now Her sacred beauty vanishes away. For Venus whilst Adonis lived was fair— Alas! her loveliness is dead with him. The oaks and mountains cry, Ai! ai! Adonis! The springs their waters change to tears and weep— The flowers are withered up with grief... Ai! ai! ... Adonis is dead Echo resounds ... Adonis dead. Who will weep not thy dreadful woe. O Venus? Soon as she saw and knew the mortal wound Of her Adonis—saw the life-blood flow From his fair thigh, now wasting,—wailing loud She clasped him, and cried ... 'Stay, Adonis! Stay, dearest one,... and mix my lips with thine— Wake yet a while, Adonis—oh, but once, That I may kiss thee now for the last time— But for as long as one short kiss may live— Oh, let thy breath flow from thy dying soul Even to my mouth and heart, that I may suck That...' NOTE: _23 his Rossetti, Dowden, Woodberry; her Boscombe manuscript, Forman

Yo seré un parque y tú serás mi venado. Aliméntate donde quieras, en la montaña o en el valle; Pace en mis labios, y si esas colinas están secas, Aléjate hacia abajo, donde hallan las fuentes agradables.

No, lady, no, my heart longs not to groan But soundly sleeps while now it sleeps alone.

By this the boy that by her side lay killed Was melted like a vapor from her sight, And in his blood that on the ground lay spilled A purple flower sprung up, checkered with white, Resembling well his pale cheeks and the blood Which in round drops upon their whiteness stood. She bows her head the new-sprung flower to smell, Comparing it to her Adonis’ breath, And says within her bosom it shall dwell, Since he himself is reft from her by death. She crops the stalk, and in the breach appears Green-dropping sap, which she compares to tears. “Poor flower,” quoth she, “this was thy father’s guise— Sweet issue of a more sweet-smelling sire— For every little grief to wet his eyes; To grow unto himself was his desire, And so ’tis thine, but know it is as good To wither in my breast as in his blood. “Here was thy father’s bed, here in my breast; Thou art the next of blood, and ’tis thy right. Lo, in this hollow cradle take thy rest; My throbbing heart shall rock thee day and night. There shall not be one minute in an hour Wherein I will not kiss my sweet love’s flower.

I’ll sigh celestial breath, whose gentle wind Shall cool the heat of this descending sun. I’ll make a shadow for thee of my hairs; If they burn too, I’ll quench them with my tears.

Fondling,” she saith, “since I have hemmed thee here Within the circuit of this ivory pale, I’ll be a park, and thou shalt be my deer. Feed where thou wilt, on mountain or in dale; Graze on my lips, and if those hills be dry, Stray lower, where the pleasant fountains lie.

But, like a stormy day, now wind, now rain, Sighs dry her cheeks, tears make them wet again.

And whe’er he run or fly, they know not whether, For through his mane and tail the high wind sings, Fanning the hairs, who wave like feathered wings.

Seeds spring from seeds, and beauty breedeth beauty; Thou wast begot; to get, it is thy duty.

Speak, fair, but speak fair words, or else be mute.

Planting oblivion, beating reason back, Forgetting shame’s pure blush and honor’s wrack.

Upon the earth’s increase why shouldst thou feed, Unless the earth with thy increase be fed? By law of nature thou art bound to breed, That thine may live when thou thyself art dead; And so in spite of death thou dost survive, In that thy likeness still is left alive.

The flowers are sweet, their colors fresh and trim, But true sweet beauty lived and died with him.

Nashe, the city’s most feared and fearless satirist, once compared the closing stanza of Harvey’s latest poem to a fart after a bowel movement. Nashe also transformed Shakespeare’s exalted Venus and Adonis into a porn parody about one man’s epic attempt to bring a London prostitute to orgasm using a dildo. Constantly offending authorities, forever on the run, Nashe jumped pen name to pen name: Cutbert Curry-knave to Pierce Penniless to Adam Evesdropper to Jocundary Merry-brains. A pamphlet got him tossed into Newgate Prison, a satiric play forced him to flee London. A friend and collaborator of Shakespeare’s, Nashe died likely of the plague around 1601, two years after the queen thought it prudent to set his life’s work ablaze in a great bonfire of lost lewd literature.

The beginning of “Shakespeare” as a literary identity occurred not with a play but a poem. In April 1593 the comic-erotic poem Venus and Adonis was entered in the Stationers’ Register, a book that functioned as an early form of copyright law. It was entered as an anonymous work, without an author’s name. Adapting tales from Ovid’s Metamorphoses, the poem tells a story of seduction.

Shortly after the registration of Venus and Adonis, the critic Gabriel Harvey boasted that he knew the identity of a masked author: “I could here dismaske such a rich mummer,” he wrote, “as would undoubtedly make this Pamphlet the vendiblest booke in London.” Harvey didn’t “dismask” the author, being “none of those, that utter all their learning at once,

Hall prudishly bemoaned—“ uncleanly.” Venus and Adonis and The Rape of Lucrece are notoriously filled with sexual imagery.

Antinous is dead, is dead for ever, Is dead for ever and all loves lament Venus herself, that was Adonis lover, Seeing him, that newly lived, now dead again, Lends her old grief's renewal to be blent With Hadrian's pain.

Youths who were most handsome. Adonis, son of Cinyras and Smyrna, whom Venus [Aphrodite] loved. Endymion, son of Aetolus, whom Luna [Selene] loved. Ganymede, son of Erichthonius, whom Jove [Zeus] loved. Hyacinthus, son of Oebalus, whom Apollo loved. Narcissus, son of the river Cephisus, who loved himself.

So avoid lions at all costs, Venus tells Adonis. Actually, avoid all creatures that like a fight. Don’t let your bravery destroy us both. This is obviously a perfectly reasonable moral to draw from the tale, although I have tended to prioritize the more subtextual moral (don’t pretend to be less than you are to make a mediocre man feel better, as you will both regret it when you have tails).