Essay on Adam's Curse - Everyone's Fate, Everyone's Tragedy

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Adam's Curse - Everyone's Fate, Everyone's Tragedy

The allusion to the biblical story of Adam and Eve in William Butler Yeats' poem, "Adam's Curse," reflects the poem's pessimistic theme: the tragic nature of fate. In the story, Adam and Eve, the first man and woman, had defied God, and consequently, were thrown out of paradise. Their punishment (and as their descendents, everyone's punishment and "fate") was to feel the joys and the pains of being human, including love and happiness but work and disappointment as well. Yeats parallels this tragedy of Adam and Eve's newly-found mortality with a narrative which is composed mostly of a conversation about the hardships of writing poetry, being beautiful, and staying in love. By linking the two stories, he implies that such endeavors are not only laborious aspects of life, but can be "destined" to end or fail also. Yeats further establishes the inevitability of something ending by setting the conversation "at one summer's end" (1) and later having the speakers see "the last embers of daylight die" (29) when the conversation itself dies.

Before the conversation dies, however, Yeats' persona begins the talk with the subject of poetry. What is interesting is that they are not composing lines together, but are discussing the end results of poems' lines. According to the persona, the process of creating poetry, including the hours spent in writing and rewriting the lines, or as Yeats states it, "stitching and unstitching" (6), ultimately will be insignificant if the lines are unsuccessful. Although he regards the act of writing poetry as more difficult than physical labor, he would rather "scrub a kitchen pavement" (8) or do other labor-intensive, yet demeaning jobs, than cr...

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...s despair in accepting that his and his lover's fate was to grow "As weary-hearted as that hollow moon" (38). The fact that this line, and not a happy, upbeat ending, closes the poem further emphasizes the tragedy.

Yeats' somber turn towards the end of the poem is also indicative of what makes fate sometimes tragic: its unpredictability. Similar to the way Adam was unaware of the consequences of eating the forbidden apple, a poet does not know how good, or bad, a poem will be until it is finished. Similar to the fleeting notion of beauty, love can easily fade. The fact that all these endeavors could be rewarding makes the sudden loss an unbearable, and therefore, "tragic" fate.

Work Cited

Yeats, William Butler. "Adam's Curse." Western Wind. 4th ed. Ed. John Frederick Nims and David Mason. Boston: McGraw-Hill Higher Education, 2000. 431-32.

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