Venus and Adonis: Stanza 1
Even as the sun with purple-colored face
Had ta'en his last leave of the weeping morn,
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.
Finally, we are ready to encounter Venus and Adonis with a sense of what his first readers would have had in mind as they read the poem (at least the ones who were following literary developments in 1593 London). In this post I intend to discuss just the first stanza, which is all that Shakespeare provides of narration to set the scene and introduce his characters.
The first thing that strikes the reader (by which I mean me) is the sheer beauty of the language. The first sentence offered to the public by William Shakespeare “Even as the sun with purple-colored face Had ta'en his last leave of the weeping morn, Rose-cheeked Adonis hied him to the chase.” is about as showy an entrance into the literary world as any writer ever made.
Paul West, In Praise of Purple Prose for the New York Times, writes, “Of course, purple is not only highly colored prose. It is the world written up, intensified and made pleasurably palpable, not only to suggest the impetuous abundance of Creation, but also to add to it by showing - showing off - the expansive power of the mind itself, its unique knack for making itself at home among trees, dawns, viruses, and then turning them into something else: a word, a daub, a sonata. The impulse here is to make everything larger than life, almost to overrespond, maybe because, habituated to life written down, in both senses, we become inured and have to be awakened with something almost intolerably vivid. When the deep purple blooms, you are looking at a dimension, not a posy.”
The term “purple prose derives from latin poet Horace’s Ars Poetica. Ben Jonson’s translation of the passage is below:
In grave beginnings, and great things profest
You have oft-times, that may out-shine the rest,
A purple piece, or two stitch'd in: when either
Diana's Grove, and Altar, with the nether
Bouts of fleet waters, that doe intertwine
The pleasant grounds, or when the River Rhine,
Or Rain-bow is describ'd; but here was now
No place for these:
Here, a poem about the Goddess of Love, in love, is about as purple as a place can be. Shakespeare does not give a precise setting or time, only a purpled dawn in the wilderness of Arcadia where Adonis, and Venus, are on the hunt.
The sun with purple-colored face and the weeping morn are examples of Prosopopeia – the proper Greek term of rhetoric for giving human features to natural objects. Astute readers would recognize these apotheosized figures as the divine representations as the Sun God Helios (sometimes conflated with Phoebus Apollo) and his sister Aurora, Goddess of the Dawn. The traditional invocation of dawn drawn from Homer (Now when Dawn in robe of saffron was hastening from the streams of Okeanos), and Virgil and repeated nearly verbatim in Clapham’s Narcissus has her, saffron-robed, race across the sky heralding the new day and bridging the liminal period between the night ruled by her sister Selene (the Moon) and brother Helios (the Sun). Shakespeare leaves her behind and it is the Purple-faced Sun that colors our scene. Readers expecting to find Philip and Mary Sidney are thus immediately rewarded by the weeping sister mourning her departed brother. Knowing the Aurora myths gives the weeping morn further significance for the story to come. Aurora weeping is an aetiological myth (it explains the morning dew) from classical mythology. In the Homeric myth the immortal Aurora falls in love with a Trojan prince, Tithonus, and begs Zeus to make him immortal. He grants the wish, but she had failed to ask for eternal youth as well, so the beautiful young Tithonus quickly, in the eternal life of the goddess, becomes aged and decrepit. Still, she remains with him, crying for his condition each morning when she must leave to bring the new day. When he is no longer recognizably a man at all she transforms him into a Cicada whose gentle buzzing greets the day each morning. Homer’s story is particularly salient to Venus and Adonis because it is offered as warning to Anchises later abducted by Venus. From their union comes Aeneas, the protagonist of Virgil’s Aeneid and founder of Rome. Alternatively, in Ovid’s Metamorphoses book 13, we see Aurora as mother of Memnon, her son by Tithonus, who fights an epic battle with Achilles before the gates of Troy. All the gods are in attendance and when Achilles slays Memnon, Zeus grants Aurora’s wish that the body not be left to be defiled, transforming Memnon and his wailing mourners into a cloud of smoke and then a flock of shorebirds (Black Ruffs for the twitchers among you). The first story speaks to the transience of youth and the dangers of consorting with gods, the second to the perils of battle even for those beloved of the gods, and so weeping Aurora reminds the reader of what will be the outcome of Venus wooing of Adonis.
Purple-colored is a compound adjective, one of four that appear in just these six lines – purple-colored, rose-cheeked, sick-thoughted, and bold-faced. All but the first are listed as first recorded usage in the OED. Shakespeare is writing at a time when the English language is evolving rapidly, incorporating words from classical languages and other romance and Germanic sources to describe the increasingly industrialized, urban and culturally modern world of the late renaissance. Shakespeare gets disproportionate credit, as many of the words that first appear in Shakespeare were likely in spoken use and print that simply has not survived, but there is little doubt that the bard is intentionally shaping the language to his poetic and dramatic needs. It is not for nothing that Bloom credits him with the invention of the modern human.
The characterization of place and time in the first two lines does not even make a complete sentence, “Even as” makes it a subjunctive clause. “Rose-cheeked Adonis” is the subject of the sentence introduced in line 3 in media res (in the middle of the action) as he “hied him to the chase.” “Even as” as preposition also introduces an interesting ambiguity to the first lines. We can take it simply to mean at the same time as, simply setting the time, or could read it as introducing metaphoric parallel of the sun with Adonis.
Shakespeare uses alliteration of h and l words to tie the poem together – “had ta’en him,” “hied him,” and Hunting he” bind the dependent clause of the first two lines to the next two introducing Adonis. “Hunting he loved but love he laughed to scorn” lead us to Venus the goddess of love who appears in the final couplet. This is also an example of polyptoton, he uses love first conjugated as a verb then as a noun in antithesis. In both constructions the grammar is inverted by placing the object (Hunting and Love) before subject and verb which emphasizes the antithesis of his affection. Both alliteration and grammar bring particular attention to the creative construction “laughed to scorn” to express his dismissal of the emotional state and foreshadowing his response to its embodied form that follows.
Finally, we meet Venus “sick-thoughted” or love sick, an inversion as this madness is usually attributed to her rather than of her. Unlike other tellings of the story we are offered no explanation for her condition, she is not accidentally or intentionally struck by Cupid’s arrow, nor are we told what she saw or heard to inspire her love. We probably should not share the Victorian and sometime modern woke concern that her love is for a prepubescent boy and there-fore sick in a moral sense. This is the passion of divinely inspired madness argued about in Plato, not the pedophilia which often accompanied it. The stanza ends as Venus “gins to woo him” Shakespeare the dramatist is done with narration and the next stanza proceeds with Venus speaking directly to Adonis setting a tone for the remainder of the poem in which she is the active party. This is emphasized by the use of Epistrophe, (the use of the same word at the end of successive verse-lines) in which Adonis, as him is object of her action.
Sick-thoughtèd Venus makes amain unto him
And, like a bold-faced suitor, gins to woo him.
I want to conclude by reviewing Shakespeare’s use of meter in the poem. Wikipedia will tell you that Venus and Adonis is written in iambic pentameter, the characteristic meter of Shakespeare’s blank verse that echoes the beating of the human heart and the natural rhythm of English speech - badum badum badum badum badum. Five iambs or iambic feet per line. Try reading it that way - it is immediately apparent that Shakespeare is not committed to keeping that meter. If we read naturally and mark the stressed syllables with a downstroke we can identify how he uses meter to shape our reading.
The opposite of an iamb is a trochee, a foot in which the first syllable is stressed and the second is not. Purple as a word represents a trochee.
/ _ / _ / _ / _ / _ /
Even as the sun with purple-colored face
_ / _ / / _ _ / _ /
Had ta'en his last leave of the weeping morn,
(the repeated emphasis of “last leave’ forces us to pause before moving on)
/ / _ / _ / _ / _ /
Rose-cheeked Adonis hied him to the chase.
/ _ _ / _ / _ / _ /
Hunting he loved, but love he laughed to scorn.
(Notice how the initial trochee echoes the broken rhythm of a galloping horse)
/ / _ / _ / _ / _ / _
Sick-thoughted Venus makes amain unto him
_ / _ / _ / _ / _ / _
And like a bold-faced suitor 'gins to woo him.
(the unstressed him at the ends of the final couplet make these feminine lines, underscoring that Venus will be the aggresor in the poem and Adonis the passive object)
Continue reading: Venus and Adonis: More white, and red than doves or roses