Part 5

Lines 673–840

673 'But if thou needs wilt hunt, be rul'd by me;
674 Uncouple at the timorous flying hare,
675 Or at the fox which lives by subtilty,
676 Or at the roe which no encounter dare:
677 Pursue these fearful creatures o'er the downs,
678 And on thy well-breath'd horse keep with thy hound.
679 'And when thou hast on foot the purblind hare,
680 Mark the poor wretch, to overshoot his troubles
681 How he outruns the winds, and with what care
682 He cranks and crosses with a thousand doubles:
683 The many musits through the which he goes
684 Are like a labyrinth to amaze his foes.
685 'Sometime he runs among a flock of sheep,
686 To make the cunning hounds mistake their smell,
687 And sometime where earth-delving conies keep,
688 To stop the loud pursuers in their yell,
689 And sometime sorteth with a herd of deer;
690 Danger deviseth shifts, wit waits on fear:
691 'For there his smell with others being mingled,
692 The hot scent-snuffing hounds are driven to doubt,
693 Ceasing their clamorous cry till they have singled
694 With much ado the cold fault cleanly out;
695 Then do they spend their mouths: Echo replies,
696 As if another chase were in the skies.
697 'By this, poor Wat, far off upon a hill,
698 Stands on his hinder legs with listening ear,
699 To hearken if his foes pursue him still:
700 Anon their loud alarums he doth hear;
701 And now his grief may be compared well
702 To one sore sick that hears the passing bell.
703 'Then shalt thou see the dew-bedabbled wretch
704 Turn, and return, indenting with the way;
705 Each envious briar his weary legs doth scratch,
706 Each shadow makes him stop, each murmur stay:
707 For misery is trodden on by many,
708 And being low never reliev'd by any.
709 'Lie quietly, and hear a little more;
710 Nay, do not struggle, for thou shalt not rise:
711 To make thee hate the hunting of the boar,
712 Unlike myself thou hear'st me moralize,
713 Applying this to that, and so to so;
714 For love can comment upon every woe.
715 'Where did I leave?' 'No matter where,' quoth he
716 'Leave me, and then the story aptly ends:
717 The night is spent,' 'Why, what of that?' quoth she.
718 'I am,' quoth he, 'expected of my friends;
719 And now 'tis dark, and going I shall fall.'
720 'In night,' quoth she, 'desire sees best of all.'
721 But if thou fall, O! then imagine this,
722 The earth, in love with thee, thy footing trips,
723 And all is but to rob thee of a kiss.
724 Rich preys make true men thieves; so do thy lips
725 Make modest Dian cloudy and forlorn,
726 Lest she should steal a kiss and die forsworn.
727 'Now of this dark night I perceive the reason:
728 Cynthia for shame obscures her silver shine
729 Till forging Nature be condemn'd of treason,
730 For stealing moulds from heaven that were divine;
731 Wherein she fram'd thee in high heaven's despite,
732 To shame the sun by day and her by night.
733 'And therefore hath she brib'd the Destinies,
734 To cross the curious workmanship of nature
735 To mingle beauty with infirmities,
736 And pure perfection with impure defeature;
737 Making it subject to the tyranny
738 Of mad mischances and much misery;
739 'As burning fevers, agues pale and faint,
740 Life-poisoning pestilence and frenzies wood,
741 The marrow-eating sickness, whose attains
742 Disorder breeds by heating of the blood;
743 Surfeits, imposthumes, grief, and damn'd despair,
744 Swear nature's death for framing thee so fair.
745 'And not the least of all these maladies
746 But in one minute's fight brings beauty under:
747 Both favour, savour hue, and qualities,
748 Whereat the impartial gazer late did wonder,
749 Are on the sudden wasted, thaw'd and done,
750 As mountain-snow melts with the mid-day sun.
751 'Therefore, despite of fruitless chastity,
752 Love-lacking vestals and self-loving nuns,
753 That on the earth would breed a scarcity
754 And barren dearth of daughters and of sons,
755 Be prodigal: the lamp that burns by night
756 Dries up his oil to lend the world his light.
757 'What is thy body but a swallowing grave,
758 Seeming to bury that posterity
759 Which by the rights of time thou needs must have,
760 If thou destroy them not in dark obscurity?
761 If so, the world will hold thee in disdain,
762 Sith in thy pride so fair a hope is slain.
763 'So in thyself thyself art made away;
764 A mischief worse than civil home-bred strife,
765 Or theirs whose desperate hands themselves do slay,
766 Or butcher-sire that reeves his son of life.
767 Foul-cankering rust the hidden treasure frets,
768 But gold that's put to use more gold begets.'
769 'Nay then,' quoth Adon, 'you will fall again
770 Into your idle over-handled theme;
771 The kiss I gave you is bestow'd in vain,
772 And all in vain you strive against the stream;
773 For by this black-fac'd night, desire's foul nurse,
774 Your treatise makes me like you worse and worse.
775 'If love have lent you twenty thousand tongues,
776 And every tongue more moving than your own,
777 Bewitching like the wanton mermaid's songs,
778 Yet from mine ear the tempting tune is blown;
779 For know, my heart stands armed in mine ear,
780 And will not let a false sound enter there;
781 'Lest the deceiving harmony should run
782 Into the quiet closure of my breast;
783 And then my little heart were quite undone,
784 In his bedchamber to be barr'd of rest.
785 No, lady, no; my heart longs not to groan,
786 But soundly sleeps, while now it sleeps alone.
787 'What have you urg'd that I cannot reprove?
788 The path is smooth that leadeth on to danger;
789 I hate not love, but your device in love
790 That lends embracements unto every stranger.
791 You do it for increase: O strange excuse!
792 When reason is the bawd to lust's abuse.
793 'Call it not, love, for Love to heaven is fled,
794 Since sweating Lust on earth usurp'd his name;
795 Under whose simple semblance he hath fed
796 Upon fresh beauty, blotting it with blame;
797 Which the hot tyrant stains and soon bereaves,
798 As caterpillars do the tender leaves.
799 'Love comforteth like sunshine after rain,
800 But Lust's effect is tempest after sun;
801 Love's gentle spring doth always fresh remain,
802 Lust's winter comes ere summer half be done.
803 Love surfeits not, Lust like a glutton dies;
804 Love is all truth, Lust full of forged lies.
805 'More I could tell, but more I dare not say;
806 The text is old, the orator too green.
807 Therefore, in sadness, now I will away;
808 My face is full of shame, my heart of teen:
809 Mine ears, that to your wanton talk attended
810 Do burn themselves for having so offended.'
811 With this he breaketh from the sweet embrace
812 Of those fair arms which bound him to her breast,
813 And homeward through the dark laund runs apace;
814 Leaves Love upon her back deeply distress'd.
815 Look, how a bright star shooteth from the sky
816 So glides he in the night from Venus' eye;
817 Which after him she darts, as one on shore
818 Gazing upon a late-embarked friend,
819 Till the wild waves will have him seen no more,
820 Whose ridges with the meeting clouds contend:
821 So did the merciless and pitchy night
822 Fold in the object that did feed her sight.
823 Whereat amaz'd, as one that unaware
824 Hath dropp'd a precious jewel in the flood,
825 Or 'stonish'd as night-wanderers often are,
826 Their light blown out in some mistrustful wood;
827 Even so confounded in the dark she lay,
828 Having lost the fair discovery of her way.
829 And now she beats her heart, whereat it groans,
830 That all the neighbour caves, as seeming troubled,
831 Make verbal repetition of her moans;
832 Passion on passion deeply is redoubled:
833 'Ay me!' she cries, and twenty times, 'Woe, woe!'
834 And twenty echoes twenty times cry so.
835 She marking them, begins a wailing note,
836 And sings extemporally a woeful ditty;
837 How love makes young men thrall and old men dote;
838 How love is wise in folly foolish-witty:
839 Her heavy anthem still concludes in woe,
840 And still the choir of echoes answer so.

Notes

TLN 674archaic vocab
“Uncouple at the timorous flying hare”
To 'uncouple' means to release hounds from their leashes at the start of a hunt. Venus urges Adonis to hunt the hare, fox, or roe deer instead of the boar; 'well-breath'd' means a horse that has been exercised and has good wind. The six-line passage is a compressed hunting manual distinguishing safe quarry from the dangerous boar.
TLN 679archaic vocab
“purblind hare”
'Purblind' means nearly blind or dim-sighted; hares were proverbially short-sighted. 'Cranks and crosses with a thousand doubles' means twists and turns and doubling back on its own track to confuse the hounds' scent. A 'musit' (line 683) is a gap in a hedge or fence through which a hare would squeeze; the hare's escape route through musits is 'like a labyrinth.'
TLN 687archaic vocab
“earth-delving conies keep”
'Conies' is the older English word for rabbits; 'earth-delving' means burrowing into the earth. 'Sorteth with' (line 689) means joins or mingles with. The hare runs through sheep, rabbits, and deer in turn so its own scent is mixed with theirs, forcing the hounds to pause and 'single out' (line 693) the right track. 'Danger deviseth shifts' means fear of danger invents strategies.
TLN 695archaic vocab
“spend their mouths: Echo replies”
To 'spend their mouths' is a hunting term meaning to give tongue — to bark or cry aloud as the hounds take up the scent again. The mythological Echo, who could only repeat the last words she heard, was imagined to live in hillside caves; her answering cry makes it sound 'as if another chase were in the skies.' The image fuses the technical world of the hunt with classical myth.
TLN 697cultural context
“poor Wat, far off upon a hill”
'Wat' was a common colloquial name for a hare in Elizabethan England, the same way a fox was called 'Reynard.' Giving the hare a pet name personalizes him — he becomes an individual wretch listening on his hill for the sound of his pursuers — and the comparison of his dread to 'one sore sick that hears the passing bell' (the church bell rung to announce someone's imminent death) turns the hunt into a scene of almost human pathos.
TLN 707rhetorical device
“misery is trodden on by many, And being low never reliev'd by any”
These two lines step out of the narrative to deliver a senten tia — a self-contained moral maxim, one of classical rhetoric's most valued ornaments. The maxim pities the wretch so far below that no one bends to help: misfortune is kicked by those who pass over it, and those who are already low get no relief. The couplet briefly opens the hare-chase into a general truth about suffering and indifference.
TLN 712syntax grammar
“Unlike myself thou hear'st me moralize”
Venus acknowledges, with self-aware irony, that delivering moral lessons ('moralize') is out of character for the goddess of love. The syntax is compressed: 'Unlike myself' is an absolute phrase meaning 'contrary to my nature.' She is telling Adonis to lie still and listen because her purpose — making him hate boar-hunting — has driven her to adopt the role of a moralising preacher, which is the last thing she usually is.
TLN 720wordplay
“desire sees best of all”
Adonis says it is dark and he will fall; Venus retorts that desire needs no light to see by — erotic longing is its own illumination. The line is a witty inversion of the Petrarchan commonplace that lovers are love-blind; Venus insists that desire sharpens rather than dims the sight. It also works as a come-on: she is telling him to stop worrying about the dark and stay.
TLN 725classical allusion
“modest Dian cloudy and forlorn”
Diana (also called Dian) was the Roman goddess of chastity, the moon, and the hunt — and Adonis the hunter is her ideal devotee. Venus argues that Adonis's lips are so tempting that even Diana, who swore to keep herself from love, would want to kiss them and so break her vow, making her 'cloudy' (sullen, upset) and 'forlorn' at her own weakness. The flattery builds him into a beauty that threatens divinity itself.
classical Diana, virgin goddess of the moon
TLN 733classical allusion
“hath she brib'd the Destinies”
The Destinies are the three Fates of classical mythology — Clotho, Lachesis, and Atropos — who spun, measured, and cut the thread of each mortal's life. Venus argues that the envious moon-goddess (Cynthia/Diana) has bribed the Fates to corrupt Adonis's beauty with disease and death: 'impure defeature' means physical disfigurement; 'mad mischances' means ruinous accidents. The speech is her argument that beauty left chaste and childless is doomed by the Fates.
TLN 739historical topical
“burning fevers, agues pale and faint”
Venus catalogs the diseases that stand ready to ruin Adonis's beauty: 'agues' are malarial fevers with shivering fits; 'frenzies wood' means raging madness ('wood' is an archaic adjective for mad or frantic); 'imposthumes' are abscesses or festering internal ulcers. 'Life-poisoning pestilence' refers to plague. All these were familiar terrors to an Elizabethan audience that had lived through recurrent outbreaks of plague, sweating sickness, and malarial fevers.
TLN 766archaic vocab
“butcher-sire that reeves his son of life”
'Reeves' here means 'robs' or 'bereaves' — it is a contracted form of 'bereaves.' 'Butcher-sire' means a father who slaughters his own son. Venus ranks self-chosen chastity as worse than civil war, worse than suicide, and worse than filicide: Adonis is simultaneously his own father and his own child, destroying his offspring before they exist. 'Foul-cankering rust the hidden treasure frets' means hidden gold rusts away if locked up unused, just as beauty withers without issue.
TLN 770rhetorical device
“idle over-handled theme”
Adonis dismisses Venus's entire speech on procreation, chastity, and beauty as 'idle over-handled theme' — a worn-out, twice-told subject. 'Striving against the stream' (line 772) is a proverb meaning fighting a hopeless battle. 'Treatise' (line 774) is used mockingly for Venus's lengthy speech: the more she argues, the worse Adonis thinks of her. He also calls the night 'desire's foul nurse' — darkness fosters lust, which is why he wants to leave before it deepens.
TLN 777classical allusion
“wanton mermaid's songs”
Adonis says that even if love had given Venus twenty thousand tongues, each more persuasive than the Sirens (here called 'mermaids' — Shakespeare uses the terms interchangeably), he would not be moved: 'the tempting tune is blown' from his ear by force of will. The Sirens of classical myth lured sailors to their deaths with irresistible song; calling Venus's persuasions 'mermaid's songs' is his most cutting dismissal of her rhetoric.
TLN 799rhetorical device
“Love comforteth like sunshine after rain”
Adonis delivers a six-line antithetical catalogue contrasting Love and Lust through paired images: sunshine vs. tempest, spring vs. winter, temperance vs. gluttony, truth vs. lies. Each line sets a positive attribute of real love against the corresponding vice of lust. The stanza is the poem's clearest senten tia, structured as a formal antithesis. 'Love surfeits not, Lust like a glutton dies' means love is never sated to excess; lust, like a glutton, eats until it destroys itself.
TLN 806wordplay
“The text is old, the orator too green”
Adonis admits he has more to say but dares not: 'the text is old' means the moral truth he has been expounding is ancient wisdom, but he himself is 'too green' — too young and inexperienced — to be a proper orator of it. 'Green' means young and unripe (as unripe fruit is green). 'In sadness' (line 807) means 'in earnest' or 'seriously,' not 'sadly.' 'Teen' (line 808) is an archaic word for grief or distress.
TLN 813archaic vocab
“homeward through the dark laund runs apace”
A 'laund' is an open glade or lawn within a forest — a clearing in the woodland. Adonis breaks from Venus's embrace and runs 'apace' (swiftly) through the dark forest clearing toward home. The physical detail is precise: a laund was a standard term in sixteenth-century forestry and hunting literature for the open ground within a deer-park where animals could be seen and counted. 'Leaves Love upon her back deeply distress'd' describes Venus left lying helpless on the ground, the goddess abandoned by the mortal.
TLN 815rhetorical device
“bright star shooteth from the sky”
The narrator uses two extended similes in rapid succession to describe Adonis vanishing into the night: first as a shooting star gliding silently across the sky, then as a ship watched from shore by someone whose 'late-embarked friend' disappears over the horizon and is swallowed by the waves. Both images stress the suddenness and completeness of Adonis's disappearance from Venus's sight; the 'pitchy' (tar-black) night 'folds in' him as if he were a possession the darkness is hoarding.
classical Venus and Adonis
TLN 829classical allusion
“she beats her heart, whereat it groans”
Abandoned in the dark, Venus beats her own breast (a classical gesture of extreme grief) and her cry is answered by the surrounding caves: 'all the neighbour caves, as seeming troubled, / Make verbal repetition of her moans.' Twenty echoes repeat her cry of 'Ay me!' twenty times. The passage explicitly invokes the myth of Echo — the nymph reduced to a repeating voice in caves — and makes Echo Venus's involuntary chorus.