Picture is interwoven with picture, each in turn contributing to the panorama of sensual Paradise.

Yet while straining all the resources of his art, with intense sympathy, to seduce his reader, the poet drops of set purpose phrases like the following: Flora non so, non so se Frine o Taide Trovar mai seppe oscenita si laide.
Here the ape masked in the man turns around and grins, gibbering vulgar words to point his meaning, and casting dirt on his pretended decency.
While racking the resources of allusive diction to veil and to suggest an immodest movement of his hero (Adonis being goaded beyond the bounds of boyish delicacy by lascivious sights), he suddenly subsides with a knavish titter into prose: Cosi il fanciullo all'inonesto gioco.
But the end of all this practice is that innocent Adonis has been conducted by slow and artfully contrived approaches to a wanton's embrace, and that the spectators of his seduction have become, as it were, parties to his fall.

To make Marino's cynicism of hypocrisy more glaring, he prefaces each canto with an allegory, declaring that Adonis and Venus symbolize the human soul abandoned to vice, and the allurements of sensuality which work its ruin.

In the poem itself, meanwhile, the hero and heroine are consistently treated as a pair of enviable, devoted, and at last unfortunate lovers.[192] It is characteristic of the mood expressed in the _Adone_ that voluptuousness should not be passionate, but sentimental.

Instead of fire, the poet gives us honeyed tears to drink, and rocks the soul upon an ever-rippling tide of Lydian melody.