Garcilaso de la Vega

The story of Adonis

The detail of the last kiss takes us to Garcilaso's source, the poem by the early pastoral poet Bion, which will have been known to Garcilaso as by Theocritus.

Venus loved Adonis, and so roused the jealous anger of Mars that, transformed into a boar, he gored the young Adonis as he and the goddess made love.

The Lament for Adonis

This ancient poem can illustrate the long tradition of threnodic pastoral; the extract serves also to illustrate a source which, on the evidence of the Egloga III, Garcilaso may well have accessed, if not in Greek, then in Latin translation.

Extracts:

“
I cry for Adonis and say The beauteous Adonis is dead and the Loves cry woe me again and say The beauteous Adonis is dead.... She saw, she marked his irresistible wound, she saw his thigh fading in a welter of blood, she lift her hands and put up the voice of lamentation saying Stay, Adonis, stay, hapless Adonis, till I come at thee one last time, till I clip thee about and mingle lip with lip. Awake, Adonis, awake for a little while, and give me one last kiss; kiss me all so long as ever the kiss be alive, till thou give up thy breath into my mouth, and thy spirit pass into my heart, till I have drunk the sweet milk of thy love-potion and have drunk up all thy love... The Lament for Adonis, by Bion, Loeb Classical Library

In Garcilaso's time, this poem was attributed to Theocritus, deemed in the literary history of the day to be the first pastoral poet, who inherited the pipes from Pan himself.

The motif of the dead Adonis in Bernardo Tasso

Garcilaso, in the Elegía I on the death of Don Bernardino de Toledo, imitates closely a passage in Bernardo Tasso, Book 2, Elegia 3 of the Amori, where Tasso draws the tale to a close thus:

  1. Non pianse semper la vermiglia Aurora
  2. il morto figlio, ma col vago amante
  3. lieta se ritornava adhora, adhora.
  4. Ne Citerea il suo gentil sembiante
  5. turbó mai sempre per lamato Adone,
  6. ne portó molli ognhor le luci sante.
  7. Ma poi che i verdi panni e le corone
  8. squarciate, per pietá del suo lamento,
  9. fé piangere seco i sassi e le person;
  10. Rivestita de gioia e di contento
  11. asciugó gli humid'occhi e lagrimosi;
  12. e presse le ghirnalde e l'ornamento;
  13. E per le piaggie e per le colli umbrosi
  14. del suo bel Gnido con le Ninfe a paro
  15. guidava dolci balli e amorosi,
  16. senza sentir giamai piu nullo amaro.

Bernardo Tasso's ending, in which Venus sets aside grief and leads her nymphs over the beaches and hills of Gnidos, is imitated in the majestic lines of Garcilaso's Elegía, as an injunction to cease mourning. In Garcilasos Elegía, we are in the presence of a recurring theme in Garcilaso, the dangers that beset the active life, the violence that accompanies the soldier in his duty to serve. In the Elegía he writes of el gran proceso, the course of great events that mean excess of dangers and of war. In his version of the story of Venus and Adonis there is the unspoken figure of Mars, the angry god of war. So the story has relevance to the personal internal conflict between himself as a man of peace/love/art and as soldier.