🌹 Stanza 192 - Literary Analysis

Shakespeare's Venus and Adonis

📖 Original Stanza

'It shall be sparing and too full of riot,
Teaching decrepit age to tread the measures;       
The staring ruffian shall it keep in quiet,
Pluck down the rich, enrich the poor with treasures;
It shall be raging mad, and silly mild,
Make the young old, the old become a child.

🔍 Line-by-Line Analysis

Line 1: "'It shall be sparing and too full of riot,"

"It shall be sparing": Love will be stingy, restrained, withholding. It will be cautious and conservative.
"and too full of riot": And excessively wild, overly chaotic. The same love will also be completely unrestrained.
Meaning: "It will be both stingy and excessively wild,"

Line 2: "Teaching decrepit age to tread the measures;"

"Teaching decrepit age": Instructing old, feeble people. Love will affect even the elderly.
"to tread the measures": To dance, to perform dance steps. "Measures" refers to formal dance patterns.
Meaning: "Teaching ancient people to dance;"

Line 3: "The staring ruffian shall it keep in quiet,"

"The staring ruffian": The glaring, violent criminal. Love will affect even dangerous people.
"shall it keep in quiet": Love will make peaceful, will silence. Love will calm the violent.
Meaning: "It will quiet the glaring criminal,"

Line 4: "Pluck down the rich, enrich the poor with treasures;"

"Pluck down the rich": Bring down the wealthy, humble the powerful. Love will destroy high status.
"enrich the poor with treasures": Give wealth to the impoverished. Love will elevate the lowly.
Meaning: "Bring down the rich, and enrich the poor with treasures;"

Line 5: "It shall be raging mad, and silly mild,"

"It shall be raging mad": It will be furiously insane, violently crazy. Love will be extremely passionate.
"and silly mild": And foolishly gentle, stupidly calm. The same love will also be absurdly peaceful.
Meaning: "It will be furiously mad, and foolishly gentle,"

Line 6: "Make the young old, the old become a child."

"Make the young old": Age the youthful, make young people act elderly. Love will burden youth with age.
"the old become a child": Make elderly people childlike. Love will make old people act young.
Meaning: "Make young people old, and old people childlike."

🎭 Literary Devices

Device	Example	Effect
Paradox	"sparing and too full of riot"	Shows love's contradictory nature
Social Inversion	Rich become poor, poor become rich	Love reverses social hierarchies
Age Reversal	Young become old, old become children	Love inverts natural aging process
Behavioral Transformation	Ruffians become quiet	Love changes fundamental personality
Oxymoron	"raging mad, and silly mild"	Combines opposite emotional states
Class Mobility	"Pluck down...enrich"	Love disrupts economic order
Dance Imagery	Old people "tread the measures"	Shows love making impossible things happen
Comprehensive Contradiction	Every statement paired with its opposite	Creates complete chaos

🎯 Overall Meaning & Significance in the Context of the Poem

This stanza continues Venus's curse by showing how love will create universal chaos through contradictions and inversions of natural order, making everything into its opposite simultaneously.

The Ultimate Contradiction: Love will be both "sparing and too full of riot"—simultaneously restrained and wild, creating impossible contradictions within single relationships.

Social Revolution: Love will "pluck down the rich" and "enrich the poor," making it a force for complete social upheaval that destroys existing class structures.

Age Inversion: Love will make "the young old" and "the old become a child," reversing the natural progression of life and making age meaningless.

Behavioral Transformation: Even dangerous "ruffians" will be made "quiet" by love, showing its power to transform fundamental personality traits.

The Dancing Dead: The image of "decrepit age" learning to "tread the measures" shows love making the impossible happen—the elderly becoming dancers despite physical limitations.

Emotional Schizophrenia: Love will be "raging mad, and silly mild" simultaneously, creating internal emotional contradictions that make stable feeling impossible.

Economic Chaos: By reversing wealth distribution, love becomes a force for complete economic disruption, destroying material security.

The End of Categories: Venus's curse eliminates all stable categories—rich/poor, young/old, violent/peaceful, mad/mild—making social organization impossible.

Universal Instability: Every aspect of human society and individual psychology will be subject to love's contradictory transformations.

The Impossibility of Prediction: With love creating simultaneous opposites, no one can predict how it will affect them or their society.

This stanza shows Venus cursing humanity with a love that makes all stable categories meaningless, creating a world of perpetual contradiction and social chaos.