Summary
Venus hears a man cry out, and immediately pursues the sound.
As she searches for Adonis, she continues to speak directly to death, saying she had been speaking merely in "jest" earlier when she believed Adonis to be dead (997). She also addresses the god Jove, saying that she was foolish to ever think something so beautiful would be killed.
Finally, she comes near where Adonis sits. He has been bloodied by a wound in his side, and Venus realizes he is dead.
Immobilized by her grief, Venus laments Adonis by explaining the myriad of ways that nature herself loved him. She states that even the boar must have loved him, and killing him was an accident because the boar had actually meant to kiss him.
Venus announces her own prophesy for the future, declaring that love will henceforth by characterized as "fickle, false and full of fraud" (1141) and will upend the lives of all who experience it.
In Adonis's blood that spilled on the ground, Venus notices a small purple flower. She plucks it and puts it to her breast, addressing the flower as if it is Adonis's child. She commits to keeping the flower safe and "rock[ing] thee day and night" (1186).
The poem concludes with Venus flying away to Paphos where she intends to hide herself away from the rest of the world.
Analysis
In this final section of the poem, the narrative takes up the notion of grief and its various incarnations.
Venus's behavior in the latter half of the poem is notably erratic as she attempts to prevent the prophecy she had of Adonis's death from coming true. Throughout Adonis's absence, Venus experiences feelings of anger, sadness, paralysis, madness, denial, vengeance, and resignation. This trajectory for her character is emblematic of the complicated and variegated nature of grief.
Her chiding of death and subsequent retraction of her words showcases how the logical aspects of her character – those she relied on in her many attempts to convince Adonis to return her affections – have started to diminish as she becomes overtaken by the fear of losing Adonis.
When she discovers he is dead, she employs the literary device of the pathetic fallacy at great length. This device attaches human emotion to non-human entities, usually those associated with the natural world. "When he beheld his shadow in the brook," she says of Adonis, "The fishes spread on it their golden gills; / When he was by, the birds such pleasure took / That some would sing, some other in their bills / Would bring him mulberries and ripe-red cherries: / He fed them with his sight, they him with berries" (1099-1104). Her argument here that nature itself loved Adonis – which leads her to believe the boar that killed him was only trying to kiss him – emphasizes Venus's grief as a combination of fantasy and denial.
Venus transitions from this semi-mad state of remembrance to prophesy that love will be a painful experience for future lovers, a declaration that highlights her grief in the form of revenge. But this moment also suggests an origin story for the poetic conventions of Petrarchanism that were so popular in early modern England. Venus says, "Sorry on love hereafter shall attend. / It shall be waited on with jealousy, / Find sweet beginning, but unsavoury end" (1136-1138). The depiction of love as fundamentally painful, fickle, and unpredictable correlates with the poetic mode that Frencesco Petrarca invented in the fourteenth century that would later be adopted by early modern English poets like Shakespeare himself. These poets – who often wrote in the sonnet form – presented love as an essentially paradoxical experience, one that lifted speakers up to euphoric states at the same time it ushered in painful reckonings with reality, usually in the form of unrequited love. When Venus announces that love will be plagued by uncertainty and doubt, she predicts the arrival of the very poetic mode that Shakespeare himself used and also critiqued. In this way, Shakespeare co-opts the story of Venus and Adonis to comment not only on the early modern conceptions of love and procreation, but also on the history and evolution of poetry itself.
