- Feb 3, 2024
- LitBits
- 0
New blog post by Vagabond Heart
WTF, Will! The poems 1 – 5
Well, I’d just read all of Shakespeare’s plays and I was feeling extremely showy-offy.
And yes, I’d been totally mind-blown or singularly unimpressed and all the stops inbetween. But I couldn’t say I’d read the Complete Works until I’d ploughed through the poems as well. So off I went.
Venus and Adonis
Well this was pretty racy, as you’d expect from a poem with the Goddess of Love in the title. A bit more Shakespearean soft porn, methought.
It went like this. Venus (horny goddess) wanted to shag Adonis (most gorgeous man alive), and for most of this poem she did everything she could not to take no for an answer. She’d pulled him off his horse, pinned him to the ground, and I kept thinking I was about to read the world’s most poetic rape.
And you’ve got to give her 10/10 for effort, because I genuinely thought I’d read it wrong when she told him that if he really couldn’t face kissing her on the mouth, he could always go downstairs.
Much to her bafflement, Adonis just wanted to get back on his horse and kill stuff. She pointed out that he was missing quite an opportunity here – she was Venus, after all. But no, he’d rather be off hunting (I personally thought he was VERY Greek, if you get my drift, but this didn’t seem to cross her mind).
Weirdly, even his horse would rather be shagging, having seen a mare in the distance that really did it for him.
Eventually, and probably from all that blood leaving her brain to go elsewhere, Venus fainted as if dead. Worried, Adonis finally tried to kiss her back to life – but not before he’d slapped her face a fair bit first. What a guy.
She recovered, pleaded more, and then got given a stern lecture on the difference between love and lust by Adonis (like she cared, lol!).
Then she had a vision that he’d be killed by a boar if he went hunting. So he ignored her, went hunting and promptly got killed by a boar.
Then he turned into a flower (confirming all my suspicions about him). Which is how we got the Anemone, and led to Venus deciding that all love would now have pain in it. Yeah, cheers for that, Goddess of sluts.
5/10
Not bowled over by that one, I moved on.
Lucrece
Oh sweet baby Jesus, this was worse than I expected – not because of the language (which was glorious) – but because of the content.
The rape of Lucretia may be famous (the event was said to cause the fall of the Roman Royal family, and turn Rome into a republic), but it was vile to read about.
And the fact that Shakespeare’s eloquence imbued it with incredible detail, and gave us utterly intense descriptions of Lucrece’s ordeal, only made it harder to undergo.
I mean, top marks, Will, for making it come alive so successfully and for being so clearly on her side, but zero marks for imagining that’s the experience we all wanted to share.
Did you really, for instance, have to write 39 stanzas – that’s 273 sodding lines! – of the bottom-feeding-bastard King Tarquin’s reasoning, as he justified to himself the act he was about to commit? FYI ‘she made me do it by being beautiful’ was up there, for fucks’ sake.
And what about the 56 horrible lines of him telling her (at knife-point) that unless she let him rape her, he’d kill both her and some nameless groom, who he’d then stick in her bed? He’d then claim he found them together and, of course, had to slay them for dishonouring his friend (yep, this was his good friend’s wife). From which act her whole family would be permanently disgraced.
And not forgetting the further 70 lines of her pleading with him. 70 lines! Which we have to read despite knowing from the beginning that it’s not going to do her any good.
After all of that lot I felt extremely angry and fighting the desire to go in search of a bar fight.
The poem finished with her suicide, and the revenge was that Tarquin and his family were banished. And that’s all, folks!
I found myself yelling at the book, ‘Why, when you lot are perfectly willing to castrate small boys just because they have pretty voices, can’t you do the same to this morally bankrupt, predatory reptile? And don’t stop at his balls!’
And then I had to immediately watch Bake-off to try to disinfect my brain.
1/10 for it being creepily voyeuristic.
A Lover’s Complaint
I was hoping this was going to be a complaint along the lines of, ‘I’ve got a nasty case of the withering scags and so must to my bed’. But no.
It was basically an Elizabethan County-and-Western song, of the ‘He done me wrong’ variety.
He was a pretty boy who put it about a lot (cos really not short on offers, including a nun who broke her vows for him).
She was the nice girl who was telling him to sling his hook.
Half the poem was the speech he deployed that made her finally give in, and was probably a useful ‘How to’ guide for all the young men of the time.
Cue the usual: abandonment, tears, a riverside location where she chucked away everything he’d given her (personally, I’d have sold it – lots of jewellery), and a friendly ear to tell her Dolly Parton-style troubles to.
And then, proving that she truly belonged on a daytime TV talk show, she said she’d do it again if he asked her. Sigh. There’s no helping some people.
2/10
The Passionate Pilgrim
This collection of poems were a bit of a con, as the clever money says most of these were not by Shakespeare at all.
My favourite was a slightly altered version of one that’s well known to be by Christopher Marlowe (that one that goes, ‘Come, live with me, and be my love’, in case you’re wondering).
But, they were once attributed to our Will, so my Complete Works was doing the decent thing and putting them up there, just in case. Frankly, they needn’t have bothered, because they were all a bit meh.
3/10
The Phoenix and Turtle
What can I say about this? Um. Don’t bother. Yeah, that’s what I’d say about this.
1/10
I was so close to the end now. I just had The Sonnets to go. Were they as quotable as everyone seemed to make out? Or would then end up impressing me about as much as the phoenix/turtle shit? Catch me next time for my very last Shakespeare review.
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WTF, Will! The poems 1 – 5
Well, I’d just read all of Shakespeare’s plays and I was feeling extremely showy-offy.
And yes, I’d been totally mind-blown or singularly unimpressed and all the stops inbetween. But I couldn’t say I’d read the Complete Works until I’d ploughed through the poems as well. So off I went.
Venus and Adonis
Well this was pretty racy, as you’d expect from a poem with the Goddess of Love in the title. A bit more Shakespearean soft porn, methought.
It went like this. Venus (horny goddess) wanted to shag Adonis (most gorgeous man alive), and for most of this poem she did everything she could not to take no for an answer. She’d pulled him off his horse, pinned him to the ground, and I kept thinking I was about to read the world’s most poetic rape.
And you’ve got to give her 10/10 for effort, because I genuinely thought I’d read it wrong when she told him that if he really couldn’t face kissing her on the mouth, he could always go downstairs.
Much to her bafflement, Adonis just wanted to get back on his horse and kill stuff. She pointed out that he was missing quite an opportunity here – she was Venus, after all. But no, he’d rather be off hunting (I personally thought he was VERY Greek, if you get my drift, but this didn’t seem to cross her mind).
Weirdly, even his horse would rather be shagging, having seen a mare in the distance that really did it for him.
Eventually, and probably from all that blood leaving her brain to go elsewhere, Venus fainted as if dead. Worried, Adonis finally tried to kiss her back to life – but not before he’d slapped her face a fair bit first. What a guy.
She recovered, pleaded more, and then got given a stern lecture on the difference between love and lust by Adonis (like she cared, lol!).
Then she had a vision that he’d be killed by a boar if he went hunting. So he ignored her, went hunting and promptly got killed by a boar.
Then he turned into a flower (confirming all my suspicions about him). Which is how we got the Anemone, and led to Venus deciding that all love would now have pain in it. Yeah, cheers for that, Goddess of sluts.
5/10
Not bowled over by that one, I moved on.
Lucrece
Oh sweet baby Jesus, this was worse than I expected – not because of the language (which was glorious) – but because of the content.
The rape of Lucretia may be famous (the event was said to cause the fall of the Roman Royal family, and turn Rome into a republic), but it was vile to read about.
And the fact that Shakespeare’s eloquence imbued it with incredible detail, and gave us utterly intense descriptions of Lucrece’s ordeal, only made it harder to undergo.
I mean, top marks, Will, for making it come alive so successfully and for being so clearly on her side, but zero marks for imagining that’s the experience we all wanted to share.
Did you really, for instance, have to write 39 stanzas – that’s 273 sodding lines! – of the bottom-feeding-bastard King Tarquin’s reasoning, as he justified to himself the act he was about to commit? FYI ‘she made me do it by being beautiful’ was up there, for fucks’ sake.
And what about the 56 horrible lines of him telling her (at knife-point) that unless she let him rape her, he’d kill both her and some nameless groom, who he’d then stick in her bed? He’d then claim he found them together and, of course, had to slay them for dishonouring his friend (yep, this was his good friend’s wife). From which act her whole family would be permanently disgraced.
And not forgetting the further 70 lines of her pleading with him. 70 lines! Which we have to read despite knowing from the beginning that it’s not going to do her any good.
After all of that lot I felt extremely angry and fighting the desire to go in search of a bar fight.
The poem finished with her suicide, and the revenge was that Tarquin and his family were banished. And that’s all, folks!
I found myself yelling at the book, ‘Why, when you lot are perfectly willing to castrate small boys just because they have pretty voices, can’t you do the same to this morally bankrupt, predatory reptile? And don’t stop at his balls!’
And then I had to immediately watch Bake-off to try to disinfect my brain.
1/10 for it being creepily voyeuristic.
A Lover’s Complaint
I was hoping this was going to be a complaint along the lines of, ‘I’ve got a nasty case of the withering scags and so must to my bed’. But no.
It was basically an Elizabethan County-and-Western song, of the ‘He done me wrong’ variety.
He was a pretty boy who put it about a lot (cos really not short on offers, including a nun who broke her vows for him).
She was the nice girl who was telling him to sling his hook.
Half the poem was the speech he deployed that made her finally give in, and was probably a useful ‘How to’ guide for all the young men of the time.
Cue the usual: abandonment, tears, a riverside location where she chucked away everything he’d given her (personally, I’d have sold it – lots of jewellery), and a friendly ear to tell her Dolly Parton-style troubles to.
And then, proving that she truly belonged on a daytime TV talk show, she said she’d do it again if he asked her. Sigh. There’s no helping some people.
2/10
The Passionate Pilgrim
This collection of poems were a bit of a con, as the clever money says most of these were not by Shakespeare at all.
My favourite was a slightly altered version of one that’s well known to be by Christopher Marlowe (that one that goes, ‘Come, live with me, and be my love’, in case you’re wondering).
But, they were once attributed to our Will, so my Complete Works was doing the decent thing and putting them up there, just in case. Frankly, they needn’t have bothered, because they were all a bit meh.
3/10
The Phoenix and Turtle
What can I say about this? Um. Don’t bother. Yeah, that’s what I’d say about this.
1/10
I was so close to the end now. I just had The Sonnets to go. Were they as quotable as everyone seemed to make out? Or would then end up impressing me about as much as the phoenix/turtle shit? Catch me next time for my very last Shakespeare review.
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