The Passionate Pilgrim

Chapter 12: XI

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About This Book

The collection assembles short lyric poems and sonnets that probe varied aspects of romantic experience—infatuation, betrayal, longing, and the tension between youth and age. Individual pieces shift between playful flirtation and melancholy meditation, employing images of music, flowers, and classical myth to explore desire, faithlessness, beauty’s transience, and art’s consolations. Voices alternate among confident bravado, rueful self-awareness, and ironic detachment, producing a compact but diverse emotional range across tightly composed lyrics. The sequence highlights the instability of vows and appearances, the rivalries of competing affections, and the ways poetry preserves, reshapes, and questions longing.

XI

Venus, with young Adonis sitting by her
Under a myrtle shade, began to woo him;
She told the youngling how god Mars did try her,
And as he fell to her, she fell to him.
“Even thus,” quoth she, “the warlike god embrac’d me,”
And then she clipp’d Adonis in her arms;
“Even thus,” quoth she, “the warlike god unlaced me;”
As if the boy should use like loving charms;
“Even thus,” quoth she, “he seized on my lips,”
And with her lips on his did act the seizure;
And as she fetched breath, away he skips,
And would not take her meaning nor her pleasure.
Ah, that I had my lady at this bay,
To kiss and clip me till I run away!