ABSTRACT
The author argues, is at once an attempt to valorize sexual pleasure, and to demonstrate how poetry concerned with sexual love can nonetheless remain chaste. The bereft poet attempts to comfort himself with that internalized image: The neoplatonizing language here would seem to affirm the capacity of 'th'Ida playne' of the Lady at least to take the place of the actual woman. It is in this setting that we have the joining of Venus and Adonis: Having surrounded Venus and Adonis with this protective mantle of the sacred, Spenser humanizes the myth. It is a considerable shift from the Garden of Adonis back to the passage in the Epithalamion, but she will argue that the journey is shorter than one might think. The stern stress on pleasure as a mere distraction from the soul's journey beyond the world is modified in some platonic work including that of Spenser by reference to the materialist tradition associated with Lucretius.
