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Disillusionment in W.B Yeats Adam's curse
Disillusionment in W.B Yeats Adam's curse
Disillusionment in W.B Yeats Adam's curse
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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.
In the end of the narrator’s consciousness, the tone of the poem shifted from a hopeless bleak
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The timeless essence and the ambivalence in Yeats’ poems urge the reader’s response to relevant themes in society today. This enduring power of Yeats’ poetry, influenced by the Mystic and pagan influences is embedded within the textual integrity drawn from poetic techniques and structure when discussing relevant contextual concerns.
In the poem we get the picture that Adam is lamenting for the mistake they have done and specially blames and insults Eve's female nature and wonders why do god ever created her. She begs his forgiveness, and pleads with him not to leave her. She reminds him that the snake tricked her, but she fully accepts the blame for sinning against both God and him. She argues that unity and love c...
...ory is not a nightmare from which Yeats is trying to awake; it is the very world in which he lives. When he says that if Gonne had understood him he would have ?been content to live,? it is another way of saying that (since she can never understand him) he is not content to live. As a poet, he has undergone a kind of death, rendering him a lifeless observer of the present while becoming an active participant in the past which his poetry explores. Whether he sees this role as a dream or a nightmare, if Yeats ever awoke from history, he would cease to be a true poet and his verse would lose its true meaning.
The concept of loss is a notable theme in poetry, whether its about love, beauty or even
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He likens his poetry to nature also. He uses "words, like weeds..." (5.9) to envelope himself from the pain. His poem is "this poor flower of poesy" (8.18) but he writes it anyway since it once pleased his dead friend. "I go to plant it on his tomb./ That if it can it there may bloom,/ Or dying, there at least may die" (8.22-24). At this point he is considering the possibility of life continuing, at least through his poetry. Yet he does not seem to care about this possibility strongly. If there is no life within his poetry, then he feels its proper place is dead with his friend. Further into the poem, the immediate frenzy of grief has subsided, and he reflects upon his grief more calmly. "Calm is the morn without a sound,/ Calm as to suit a calmer grief, And only through the faded leaf/ The chestnut pattering to the ground" (11.1-4).
Though written only two years after the first version of "The Shadowy Waters", W.B. Yeats' poem "Adam's Curse" can be seen as an example of a dramatic transformation of Yeats' poetic works: a movement away from the rich mythology of Ireland's Celtic past and towards a more accessible poesy focused on the external world. Despite this turn in focus towards the world around him, Yeats retains his interest in symbolism, and one aspect of his change in style is internalization of the symbolic scheme that underlies his poetry. Whereas more mythological works like "The Shadowy Waters" betray a spiritual syncretism not unlike that of the Golden Dawn, "Adam's Curse" and its more realistic fellows offer a view of the world in which symbolic systems are submerged, creating an undercurrent of meaning which lends depth to the outward circumstances, but which is itself not immediately accessible to the lay or academic reader. In a metaphorical sense, then, Yeats seems in these later poems to achieve a doubling of audience, an equivocation which addresses the initiate and the lay reader simultaneously.
The poem "Adam's Curse" (William Butler Yeats, reprinted in Richard Ellmann and Robert O'Clair. The Norton Anthology of Modern Poetry, 2nd ed. [W.W. Norton & Company, Inc. 1988] 147-148) carries the theme of a curse throughout the poem, and ties it in with experiences in the text. "Adam's Curse" can make connections with three situations that are central to the poem, and they are the following: first, the "pain and hard work" (footnote 6 p147) of deciphering poetry; next, the "pain and hard work" (p147) of being a woman, and finally the "pain and hard work" (p147) of making love work. These connections create and support the central story of the poem, and give the poem its unique feel. The feel of the poem is helped immensely by the form which is unassuming, as it lets the story tell itself without interfering. Together, the form and the numerous examples of a disheartening plague create a solid piece of work that can make a reader's heart cry. " A line will take us hours maybe/ Yet if it does not seem a moment's thought/ Our stitching and unstitching has been naught…"(4-6). With these lines, Yeats sets up the situation of poetry reading and deconstructing a poem for greater meaning for his three main characters. They invest many hours pondering poetry and if this exercise does not turn up deeper insight, all their work of examining the poem from different perspectives and angles- hence the "stitching and unstitching"(6)- has been for nothing. The narrator and his companions define themselves by their work, and deep down inside of them their toiling represents the core of their beings. This sentiment is best exemplified by the lines "Better go down upon your marrow bones/ And scrub a ...
Simon & Schuster, Inc., 1996. The “Yeats, William Butler”. Microsoft Encyclopedia of the Encarta Encyclopedia. 1996.
He dedicated countless hours of research to studying ocular science before he concluded that “he could not depict correctly on canvas everything he saw with two eyes” (Wade, et al.). His studies of vision (Fig. 2) show the differences between a binocular view and a monocular view of an object. He found that a painting can only show a monocular view of the object, because when viewing an object with one eye, part of the background will not be visible; however, when viewing an object with two eyes, the viewer is able to see everything behind the object, because eye ‘s’ sees space ‘m x’ while eye ‘r’ sees space ‘x n’. In painting, this cannot be possible, because the painted object covers everything behind it. His findings were that “it is impossible for a painting even though executed with the greatest perfection of outline, shadow, light, and color to seem in the same relief as the natural model, unless that natural model is looked at from a great distance with one eye.” (Wade, et al.). These findings led him to abandon linear perspective in pursuit of atmospheric
death of a fellow poet, Auden may be lamenting the ultimate futility of Yeats’ life and art