Sanam Shahedali
Professor
Firouzeh Ameri, PhD
Contemporary
English Poetry
4 July 2017
As members of the human society
in the technology-dominated 21st century, those specializing in literature are
often faced with these questions: What is the function of literature and poetry?
How do literary-oriented minds contribute to the advancement of human good? What
is the use of producing, reading, and analyzing various literary texts? Where
does producing and studying literature stand compared to saving lives and
promoting health through medical practices, putting bread on the tables through
farming, or making houses to shelter people with the help of engineers? These
questions must have been on the mind of the Irish poet William Butler Yeats
when he composed the poem “Adam’s Curse” more than a century earlier in 1902.
The poem “Adam’s Curse”, first
published in his 1904 poetry collection In the Seven Woods, is exemplary
of Yeats’s middle period which is marked by his endeavors to abandon the
Romantic tendencies of his previous poems along with his movement towards a
more concrete and solid style. The poem uses a straightforward, and sometimes colloquial
language to discuss the issues of poetry, beauty, love, and the demands of the
20th century modernist world.
The title is a reference to the myth
of creation in which Adam and Eve – having disobeyed God by eating the
forbidden fruit - are expelled from Eden and are cursed “with a life of toil
and labor” (Genesis 3.17-19). “Adam’s Curse” opens with the description of “one
summer’s end” on which three people, the narrator persona “I”, his beloved “you”
and the beloved’s “close friend” - corresponding biographically to Yeats
himself, the Irish actor and nationalist Maud Gonne with whom he was
desperately in love but who refused to marry him, and Maud’s sister Kathleen
Pilcher – are sitting together discussing poetry. The speaker explains that a
line of poetry may take hours to compose, but the awkwardness and pain of
producing poetry should not be reflected in the poem. On the contrary, it
should sound smooth and spontaneous to the reader; otherwise, all the “stitching
and unstitching” would be for nothing. For the speaker, whom we can safely identify
as the poet Yeats, the process of producing poetry is a strenuous task
involving the joining and mending of various ideas and linguistic components.
He believes that if poets fail to produce poems that “seem a moment’s thought”,
they better go do menial work such as scrubbing floors on their knees or
breaking stones in harsh conditions, because “to articulate sweet sounds together”
is a task harder than them all, and, to make things worse, poets are considered
an idle lot by the pompous groups of the society such as bankers, schoolmasters
and clergymen, who are convinced that only those who take on tangible
responsibilities are doing real work.
Next, the friend of the speaker’s
beloved – “that beautiful mild woman” – suggests with her pleasant and quiet
voice that beauty requires much effort and “labour”, and, in particular, this
is something that women can understand. The speaker concurs, asserting that
since Adam’s fall, all “fine” things are only possible through hard labour. For
example, lovers in the past felt that they should treat their love exquisitely
and learnedly, though in the speaker’s contemporary utilitarian society, such
practices are considered to be useless.
The mentioning of love leads to a
reverent silence. After the sunset, the three witness the emergence of the moon
on the night sky. Here, the moon is likened to a seashell that is “washed by
time’s waters” throughout ages. The imagery of the moon in the star-lit sky on
a summer night is redolent of a Romantic idealism. However, as it is revealed
in the next stanza, the beauty and the love that the speaker feels cannot bolster
his or his friends’ spirits in the face of the materialistic modern world in
which the Romantic or Chivalric ideas have no place, turning the moon into a
hollow shell:
That you were
beautiful, and that I strove
To love you in
the old high way of love;
That it had all
seemed happy, and yet we’d grown
As weary-hearted
as that hollow moon.
It is notable how another Irish literary figure from the Modern age talks
about the “barren shell of the moon” as a simile for the apathetic narrator almost
14 years later in a novel of his own middle period:
Nothing stirred within his soul but a cold and cruel
and loveless lust. His childhood was dead or lost and with it his soul capable
of simple joys and he was drifting amid life like the barren shell of the moon.
Art thou pale for weariness
Of climbing heaven and gazing on the earth,
Wandering companionless...?
He repeated to himself the lines of Shelley's
fragment. Its alternation of sad human ineffectiveness with vast inhuman cycles
of activity chilled him and he forgot his own human and ineffectual grieving. (A
Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man by James Joyce)
Still, unlike Stephen Dedalus in Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a
Young Man, the speaker in “Adam’s Curse” is not loveless or indifferent. He
tries to speak about the significance of poetry and he is in love with a
beautiful woman, but it appears that he is living at a time when the idea of
labouring for love, beauty, and poetry seems idle. However, both these narrators
speaking in the modern era recognize the futility of human endeavors for beauty
in the commotion of a society obsessed with industrial and technological
advancement, utilitarianism, consumerism, and materialism. Having said all
this, perhaps it is ironic that both Yeats and Joyce continue to be influential
and acclaimed in our own time. In the same manner that they were exploring new
ways to give expression to their disappointment with traditional ways of
feeling and living as well as to their alienation in a new-emerging world with
countless factories and industries, the field of literature and literary
studies is trying to establish its own standing by being innovate and moving
towards interdisciplinary studies.
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