’Call it not, love, for Love to heaven is fled,
Since sweating Lust on earth usurp’d his name;
Under whose simple semblance he hath fed
Upon fresh beauty, blotting it with blame;
Which the hot tyrant stains and soon bereaves,
As caterpillars do the tender leaves.
’Love comforteth like sunshine after rain,
But Lusts effect is tempest after sun;
Love’s gentle spring doth always fresh remain,
Lust’s winter comes ere summer half be done.
Love surfeits not, Lust like a glutton dies;
Love is all truth, Lust full of forged lies.
Taken from
Shakespeare's Venus and Adonis,
those words above are the lines spoken by Adonis, a young boy who
calls himself “green” and “too young” for love. But Venus
clearly doesn't agree with him on that matter. She has great love for
him – or, as Adonis says, Lust.
It's
actually interesting to read how Adonis defines the difference
between love and lust. He first says that people usually mistake
'lust' for 'love', as if lust “usurp'd his [Love's] name.” But in
later lines he tells Venus some differences between love and lust. I
personally love the last line: “Love is all truth, Lust full of
forged lies.”
Please
share your quote with us for the weekend. Have a nice weekend.
Posts
Here is my quote for this weekend:
ReplyDelete“I could be a handsome thin young president in a suit sitting in an old fashioned rocking chair, no instead I’m just the Phantom of the Opera standing by a drape among dead fish and broken chairs—Can it be that no one cares who made me or why?”
from Jack Kerouac's novel Big Sur
Context and opinion are available here:
http://bit.ly/XgWaP3