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| English Literature Plus 2020 |
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1. Edmund Spenser
Adonis is a key figure in book 3 of The Faerie Queene, which deals with love and sexuality, but he appears in strikingly different forms. In canto 1 the tapestrles in the castle of the promiscuous Malecasta gorgeously depict the story of Venus and Adonis-the goddess’s sick passion, the ‘sleights and sweet allurements’ with which she seduces the innocent boy, her desolating grief at his death-in an image of the cruelty and wastefulness of illicit love. In canto 6, however, the description of the Garden of Adonis, Spenser takes a very different approach. In a sense this passage rests on an inspired mistake: Spenser has turned the miniature ‘gardens’ of earth and herbs, sacrificed by the ancients to the dying god, into an actual place, a paradisal garden which forms a kind of pagan counterpart to the Garden of Eden. At the centre of this paradise, the heart of Venus’s realm on earth, the resurrected Adonis lies concealed in a secret bower, and there he and Venus enjoy one another in ‘eternal bliss'. Moral criticism seems irrelevant here; as in the ancient myths, the sexual union of the great goddess and her lover generates the energies which sustain the Garden, which in turn represents the processes of reproduction and fertility that keep the entire world alive. Subject to mortality and yet never dying, perpetually transformed into new shapes, Adonis is ‘the father of all forms'; he seems to be a symbol, not just of corn or vegetation, but of all living matter, all bodies. The Garden-which is ambiguously both an aspect of our own world and a separate realm where things exist before birth and after death-is the place where matter is united with spirit, body with soul, to create the creatures which are sent out into the world to take part in the endless cycle of birth, death, and reincarnation. It is an extraordinary passage, in which Spenser has grasped the significance of the ancient Tammuz myth and transformed it into a piece of complex, ornate, teasingly enigmatic Renaissance allegory.
2. John Milton
Milton echoes Spenser in the epilogue to Comus, which describes a paradisal garden where Adonis lies among hyacinths and roses, tended by ‘the Assyrian queen’, Astarte/Venus. Here, however, Adonis is still wounded, and Venus sits ‘sadly’ on the ground beside him, while ‘far above' soar her son ‘celestial Cupid' and his love Psyche. By implication, Milton sets the merely physical love which Venus and Adonis represent, here and in Spenser, well below the spiritual love represented by Cupid and Psyche (‘soul’). Nevertheless, they still have their place in paradise. Milton’s attitude is far harsher in Paradise Lost, where Tammuz/Adonis, like his lover Astarte, figures as one of the devil’s in Satan’s party, and his ‘dark idolatries’ are said to have ‘infected’ the Jews. Milton’s view of classical myth-as we have seen in his treatment of Orpheus-is exceptionally ambivalent. But such contradictions are not untypical of Renaissance mythography. Mythical figures who, if considered as real people or as objects of worship, must be sternly condemned, can be happily tolerated and even exalted if they are considered as allegories and metaphors.
3. Venus and Adonis in Shakespeare
While the mythographers and poets like Spenser and Milton explored the Adonis myth as allegory, other Renaissance writers approached it in a more Ovidian spirit: as a story about real characters, to be told for the pleasure of the story and the qualities of wit, beauty, suspense, pathos and eroticism to be found in it. The most important of these writers was Shakespeare, in his 1194-line poem Venus and Adonis.
An ‘erotic epyllion’ a ‘mini-epic’ poem, retelling a mythological love story (usually taken from Ovid) with an abundance of sensuous description, learned and witty digression, and highly wrought rhetorical display by both the characters and the narrator.
Shakespeare’s crucial departure from the Ovidian story (apparently his original invention) is that Adonis refuses to become Venus’s lover. It is easy to forget how bold and subversive this change is. The core of the ancient myth is that Venus and Adonis were lovers; the interpretation of their sexual union is crucial to all the allegorical readings of the story. The initial effect of Shakespeare’s reversal is of a travesty of the myth: a love comedy in which the conventional roles of ardent male wooer and coy mistress are reversed, made more farcical by the fact that the goddess is strong enough to pick up the reluctant youth under her arm, yet cannot cajole or bully him into a sexual response.
As it goes on, however, the poem evolves into a more serious debate, Venus arguing for the naturalness of sex and the need for the world to be peopled, Adonis virtuously or priggishly defending chastity and self-restraint. In the end Adonis, preferring hunting to love, is killed by the boar before the union is ever consummated, and Venus prophesies or curses that from henceforth all love shall be similarly unhappy.
Despite Shakespeare’s avoidance of explicit allegory, Venus and Adonis takes on a metaphorical dimension; it is in the end a serious philosophical poem about the nature of love, the conflict between sexuality and chastity, or (to put it in different and more Venus-like terms) between the life instinct and the death instinct. By contrast with Spenser’s ebullient celebration of universal fertility, it ends on a note of sadness, failure, and sterility, as the flower that was Adonis withers in Venus’s bosom.
4. “Soft Adonis” in the eighteenth century: damnned by association with effeminacy and flattery, it was now a byword for merely trivial, insubstantial court poetry.
5. Romantic revival: Shelley and the pastoral elegy
The greatest Romantic treatment of the myth is Percy Bysshe Shelley’s Adonais, an elegy for the death of Keats. Shelley’s use of the Adonis story was no doubt partly suggested by Keats’s own use of it in Endymion. At the same time, he was explicitly imitating two classical works, Bion’s “Lament for Adonis” and Moschus’s “Lament for Bion, both of which he had translated; and in doing so, he was tapping into an ancient and complex literary tradition which links the Adonis legend with the genre of pastoral elegy for a dead poet.
Bion and Moschus were both writing in the pastoral genre created by their predecessor Theocritus, about an idealised rural world in which shepherds and goatherds spend their time piping and singing about their loves, jealousies, and griefs. Pastoral lends itself to funeral elegy, partly because the genre’s frank artificiality helps to distance and formalise grief; and the implicit metaphor of shepherd-as-poet makes it particularly appropriate to an elegy for a poet. So Moschus portrays Bion as a shepherd piping to his flock; he shows the whole natural world as mourning and indeed dying in sympathy with the poet’s death; he invokes the deaths of earlier great poets; he questions divine justice ... all elements that became conventions of the genre. Moschus alludes only briefly to Adonis and the grief of Aphrodite at his death; nevertheless, the connections of the poem to Bion’s lament for Adonis, and the association of Adonis with ritualised mourning and with the themes of death and resurrection, meant that the Adonis myth became closely entwined with the tradition of pastoral elegy.
Shelley, however, like Milton, rethinks and reinvigorates the conventions of the genre and of the myth. He establishes his departure from the original Adonis myth by two bold changes of name: the hero is not Adonis but ‘Adonais’ (suggesting the Hebrew Adonai, Lord God); and the chief mourner is not Venus, Adonis’s lover, but Urania, Adonais’s mother. In early drafts the mourner was identified allegorically as ‘great Poesy’, but ‘Urania’ is a more resonant name, fusing the figure of Aphrodite Urania (the goddess of heavenly rather than earthly love) with that of Urania the muse, especially the ‘heavenly muse’ invoked by Milton in Paradise Lost . Shelley echoes elements in both Bion and Moschus, but pervasively turns the physical details of the ancient poems into allegories of thought and feeling: the poison which killed Bion becomes a symbol of the hostile criticism which destroyed Keats; the attendants who tend the body are not Loves but Thoughts, personifications of Keats’s poetic creations; Urania wounds her feet, not on brambles but (almost grotesquely) on hard human hearts and tongues.
At the same time, Shelley goes beyond the consolations offered by the myth and the ancient poems. It is no consolation to Shelley that Adonais’s grave once again produces flowers in the spring (stanzas 18-20): Adonais is not Adonis, the dying corn god, but a human being and a poet, and what matters is not the perpetual renewal of his physical body but the apparent annihilation of his mind and soul. The turning-point in the poem is Shelley’s recognition (in stanzas 42-43) that Adonais/Keats is still alive in nature, not merely as recycled matter but as a spiritual force, part of the universal mind and soul that animates nature and pushes it towards perfection. From that point the poem sweeps on to its visionary conclusion, in which Shelley seems to call for an abandonment of the material world for an ideal other world of pure thought and pure being. This is very far from the Adonis myth, which is deeply rooted in the material world; the conclusion of Adonais in effect repudiates and leaves behind the myth which was its starting-point.
6. Venus and Adonis in T. S. Eliot
T. S. Eliot drew both upon Frazer (‘ Anyone who is acquainted with these works,’ he notes, ‘will immediately recognise in the poem certain references to vegetation ceremonies') and upon Jessie L. Weston’s study of the Holy Grail legends, From Ritual to Romance, in creating the landscape of The Waste Land: an arid, sterile wilderness ruled by a sick and impotent king, imaging the spiritual, intellectual, political and sexual wasteland of the western world after the First World War. Despite repeated ‘references to vegetation ceremonies' there is little sign of rebirth in the poem’s opening section, ‘The Burial of the Dead': seeds huddle underground fearing the ordeal of birth, the clairvoyant Madame Sosostris cannot ‘find/The Hanged Man' (the dying god/Christ) in her tarot pack, and the idea of resurrection arouses horror rather than hope: ‘That corpse you planted last year in your garden,/Has it begun to sprout?’ Later in the poem there are hints of possible regeneration-especially in the images of ‘death by water’, which echo the floating of the figure of Adonis out to sea-but it ends with no clear sign of change. Though Eliot never names Adonis, we may read this as a world in which the dying god does not rise from the dead, in which (in the absence of the goddess and her lover) sexuality has become barren, bored, and sordid, and human beings are locked into a perpetual living death. |
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1. Edmund Spenser
Adonis is a key figure in book 3 of The Faerie Queene, which deals with love and sexuality, but he appears in strikingly different forms. In canto 1 the tapestrles in the castle of the promiscuous Malecasta gorgeously depict the story of Venus and Adonis-the goddess’s sick passion, the ‘sleights and sweet allurements’ with which she seduces the innocent boy, her desolating grief at his death-in an image of the cruelty and wastefulness of illicit love. In canto 6, however, the description of the Garden of Adonis, Spenser takes a very different approach. In a sense this passage rests on an inspired mistake: Spenser has turned the miniature ‘gardens’ of earth and herbs, sacrificed by the ancients to the dying god, into an actual place, a paradisal garden which forms a kind of pagan counterpart to the Garden of Eden. At the centre of this paradise, the heart of Venus’s realm on earth, the resurrected Adonis lies concealed in a secret bower, and there he and Venus enjoy one another in ‘eternal bliss'. Moral criticism seems irrelevant here; as in the ancient myths, the sexual union of the great goddess and her lover generates the energies which sustain the Garden, which in turn represents the processes of reproduction and fertility that keep the entire world alive. Subject to mortality and yet never dying, perpetually transformed into new shapes, Adonis is ‘the father of all forms'; he seems to be a symbol, not just of corn or vegetation, but of all living matter, all bodies. The Garden-which is ambiguously both an aspect of our own world and a separate realm where things exist before birth and after death-is the place where matter is united with spirit, body with soul, to create the creatures which are sent out into the world to take part in the endless cycle of birth, death, and reincarnation. It is an extraordinary passage, in which Spenser has grasped the significance of the ancient Tammuz myth and transformed it into a piece of complex, ornate, teasingly enigmatic Renaissance allegory.
2. John Milton
Milton echoes Spenser in the epilogue to Comus, which describes a paradisal garden where Adonis lies among hyacinths and roses, tended by ‘the Assyrian queen’, Astarte/Venus. Here, however, Adonis is still wounded, and Venus sits ‘sadly’ on the ground beside him, while ‘far above' soar her son ‘celestial Cupid' and his love Psyche. By implication, Milton sets the merely physical love which Venus and Adonis represent, here and in Spenser, well below the spiritual love represented by Cupid and Psyche (‘soul’). Nevertheless, they still have their place in paradise. Milton’s attitude is far harsher in Paradise Lost, where Tammuz/Adonis, like his lover Astarte, figures as one of the devil’s in Satan’s party, and his ‘dark idolatries’ are said to have ‘infected’ the Jews. Milton’s view of classical myth-as we have seen in his treatment of Orpheus-is exceptionally ambivalent. But such contradictions are not untypical of Renaissance mythography. Mythical figures who, if considered as real people or as objects of worship, must be sternly condemned, can be happily tolerated and even exalted if they are considered as allegories and metaphors.
3. Venus and Adonis in Shakespeare
While the mythographers and poets like Spenser and Milton explored the Adonis myth as allegory, other Renaissance writers approached it in a more Ovidian spirit: as a story about real characters, to be told for the pleasure of the story and the qualities of wit, beauty, suspense, pathos and eroticism to be found in it. The most important of these writers was Shakespeare, in his 1194-line poem Venus and Adonis.
An ‘erotic epyllion’ a ‘mini-epic’ poem, retelling a mythological love story (usually taken from Ovid) with an abundance of sensuous description, learned and witty digression, and highly wrought rhetorical display by both the characters and the narrator.
Shakespeare’s crucial departure from the Ovidian story (apparently his original invention) is that Adonis refuses to become Venus’s lover. It is easy to forget how bold and subversive this change is. The core of the ancient myth is that Venus and Adonis were lovers; the interpretation of their sexual union is crucial to all the allegorical readings of the story. The initial effect of Shakespeare’s reversal is of a travesty of the myth: a love comedy in which the conventional roles of ardent male wooer and coy mistress are reversed, made more farcical by the fact that the goddess is strong enough to pick up the reluctant youth under her arm, yet cannot cajole or bully him into a sexual response.
As it goes on, however, the poem evolves into a more serious debate, Venus arguing for the naturalness of sex and the need for the world to be peopled, Adonis virtuously or priggishly defending chastity and self-restraint. In the end Adonis, preferring hunting to love, is killed by the boar before the union is ever consummated, and Venus prophesies or curses that from henceforth all love shall be similarly unhappy.
Despite Shakespeare’s avoidance of explicit allegory, Venus and Adonis takes on a metaphorical dimension; it is in the end a serious philosophical poem about the nature of love, the conflict between sexuality and chastity, or (to put it in different and more Venus-like terms) between the life instinct and the death instinct. By contrast with Spenser’s ebullient celebration of universal fertility, it ends on a note of sadness, failure, and sterility, as the flower that was Adonis withers in Venus’s bosom.
4. “Soft Adonis” in the eighteenth century: damnned by association with effeminacy and flattery, it was now a byword for merely trivial, insubstantial court poetry.
5. Romantic revival: Shelley and the pastoral elegy
The greatest Romantic treatment of the myth is Percy Bysshe Shelley’s Adonais, an elegy for the death of Keats. Shelley’s use of the Adonis story was no doubt partly suggested by Keats’s own use of it in Endymion. At the same time, he was explicitly imitating two classical works, Bion’s “Lament for Adonis” and Moschus’s “Lament for Bion, both of which he had translated; and in doing so, he was tapping into an ancient and complex literary tradition which links the Adonis legend with the genre of pastoral elegy for a dead poet.
Bion and Moschus were both writing in the pastoral genre created by their predecessor Theocritus, about an idealised rural world in which shepherds and goatherds spend their time piping and singing about their loves, jealousies, and griefs. Pastoral lends itself to funeral elegy, partly because the genre’s frank artificiality helps to distance and formalise grief; and the implicit metaphor of shepherd-as-poet makes it particularly appropriate to an elegy for a poet. So Moschus portrays Bion as a shepherd piping to his flock; he shows the whole natural world as mourning and indeed dying in sympathy with the poet’s death; he invokes the deaths of earlier great poets; he questions divine justice ... all elements that became conventions of the genre. Moschus alludes only briefly to Adonis and the grief of Aphrodite at his death; nevertheless, the connections of the poem to Bion’s lament for Adonis, and the association of Adonis with ritualised mourning and with the themes of death and resurrection, meant that the Adonis myth became closely entwined with the tradition of pastoral elegy.
Shelley, however, like Milton, rethinks and reinvigorates the conventions of the genre and of the myth. He establishes his departure from the original Adonis myth by two bold changes of name: the hero is not Adonis but ‘Adonais’ (suggesting the Hebrew Adonai, Lord God); and the chief mourner is not Venus, Adonis’s lover, but Urania, Adonais’s mother. In early drafts the mourner was identified allegorically as ‘great Poesy’, but ‘Urania’ is a more resonant name, fusing the figure of Aphrodite Urania (the goddess of heavenly rather than earthly love) with that of Urania the muse, especially the ‘heavenly muse’ invoked by Milton in Paradise Lost . Shelley echoes elements in both Bion and Moschus, but pervasively turns the physical details of the ancient poems into allegories of thought and feeling: the poison which killed Bion becomes a symbol of the hostile criticism which destroyed Keats; the attendants who tend the body are not Loves but Thoughts, personifications of Keats’s poetic creations; Urania wounds her feet, not on brambles but (almost grotesquely) on hard human hearts and tongues.
At the same time, Shelley goes beyond the consolations offered by the myth and the ancient poems. It is no consolation to Shelley that Adonais’s grave once again produces flowers in the spring (stanzas 18-20): Adonais is not Adonis, the dying corn god, but a human being and a poet, and what matters is not the perpetual renewal of his physical body but the apparent annihilation of his mind and soul. The turning-point in the poem is Shelley’s recognition (in stanzas 42-43) that Adonais/Keats is still alive in nature, not merely as recycled matter but as a spiritual force, part of the universal mind and soul that animates nature and pushes it towards perfection. From that point the poem sweeps on to its visionary conclusion, in which Shelley seems to call for an abandonment of the material world for an ideal other world of pure thought and pure being. This is very far from the Adonis myth, which is deeply rooted in the material world; the conclusion of Adonais in effect repudiates and leaves behind the myth which was its starting-point.
6. Venus and Adonis in T. S. Eliot
T. S. Eliot drew both upon Frazer (‘ Anyone who is acquainted with these works,’ he notes, ‘will immediately recognise in the poem certain references to vegetation ceremonies') and upon Jessie L. Weston’s study of the Holy Grail legends, From Ritual to Romance, in creating the landscape of The Waste Land: an arid, sterile wilderness ruled by a sick and impotent king, imaging the spiritual, intellectual, political and sexual wasteland of the western world after the First World War. Despite repeated ‘references to vegetation ceremonies' there is little sign of rebirth in the poem’s opening section, ‘The Burial of the Dead': seeds huddle underground fearing the ordeal of birth, the clairvoyant Madame Sosostris cannot ‘find/The Hanged Man' (the dying god/Christ) in her tarot pack, and the idea of resurrection arouses horror rather than hope: ‘That corpse you planted last year in your garden,/Has it begun to sprout?’ Later in the poem there are hints of possible regeneration-especially in the images of ‘death by water’, which echo the floating of the figure of Adonis out to sea-but it ends with no clear sign of change. Though Eliot never names Adonis, we may read this as a world in which the dying god does not rise from the dead, in which (in the absence of the goddess and her lover) sexuality has become barren, bored, and sordid, and human beings are locked into a perpetual living death.
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