“내 생애의 첫 산물”: 「비너스와 아도니스」와 시인의 탄생

Abstract

Shakespeare’s Venus and Adonis is a narrative poem depicting the birth-pangs of a new poet in the English Ovidian tradition. In the rhetorical debate of the epyllion Venus the goddess of love tries to persuade the young fondling Adonis into her carnal desires. In the poem Venus wants to break and over-sway the unbroken wild horse of Adonis by commanding all the flourishes and ornaments of the then prevalent Ovidian and Petrarchan languages of love, though she seems to apparently subvert the given gender roles of the Petrarchan convention: she is too virile and aggressive. One of the outstanding characteristics of Venus is that she is talking and talking, even stopping Adonis’s mouth by kissing him when he tries to talk back. Venus wants Adonis the young adolescent to be immersed in the Ovidian tradition of love poems. However, to Adoniss stubborn ears, the honey-tongued rhetorical figures of Venus are like a Siren song composed in order to trap and effiminate him into old and well-wrought tradition of Ovidan love poems. When Venus recommends Adonis to hunt for Wat the hare instead of a wild boar, she is really entombing him in the womb of lust by divesting him of his vigour and dangerously untamed originality. Adonis wants the initiation of manhood of a strong poet, even it means his death, when he refuses to hear the old and mouldy tales of love Venus pours into his ear-holes. The young poet as a green orator seems to be defeated in his pursuit of a new poetics of love in the last part of the poem. However, his apparent defeat is paradoxically redeemed by his metamorphic resurrection into a white and red anemone. The breath of anemone represents the poetic inspiration of a new poet. Through Adonis Shakespeare succeeds in placing himself as an autonomous poet in the serious art of poetry, though he joins quite late in the early 1590s in the well-established tradition of English Ovidian love poems.