 Marino's poem focuses on the pleasures of love, which it describes explicitly.It describes Adonis as shooting the boar with Cupid's arrow and proclaims the tusk that crushes his hip a "loving" one.Shakespeare's homoerotic descriptions of Adonis's beauty and Venus's masculine pursuit of him inspired the French novelist and playwright Rachilde (Marguerite Vallette-Eymery) to write her erotic novel "Monsieur Vénus" (1884), about a noblewoman named Raoule de Vénérande who sexually pursues a young, effeminate man named Jacques who works in a flower shop.