Hi Robert,
As always, this is a wonderful discussion. Here's my take on the poem:
In “Adam’s Curse,” the first question one must ask is, “why the title?” The curse of Adam is, of course, that after temptation and fall he will have to work the land to make it come alive with food. But of course, this is not a conversation between Adams. This is a conversation between an Adam (Yeats) and two Eves, one mild and sweet (Kathleen Gonne) and one the object of the man’s failed love (Maud Gonne). Thus, the second and perhaps more important question one must ask about the poem is, “what about Eve’s curse?” Eve's curse, of course, was that she would bring forth children “with pain.” Thus, both Adam and Eve deliver life through the pains they take and through the body’s pain.
In Yeats’ poem, however, the man’s curse is turned from physical to mental labor --- he must meticulously work the lines of his poems to make them seem natural and vernacular, while those of the world of serious masculine professions, “the noisy set / Of bankers, schoolmasters, and clergymen,” dismiss that work even though it’s “harder than” physical labor.
The mild woman responds that women “must labour to be beautiful" and man responds, “It's certain there is no fine thing / Since Adam's fall but needs much labouring.” The word “labour” is key here, because it does double duty, suggesting both work and childbirth.
Here the conversation shifts to love, and the three fall silent. The poem takes a sad turn here, as Yeats asserts that unlike those who loved on the surface, he sought to love Maud Gonne “in the old high way of love,” but that things had turned sour. From the Paradise of love, they have been exiled: “it had all seemed happy, and yet we'd grown / As weary-hearted as that hollow moon.”
My reading of the poem is that everything hinges on that “hollow moon” that is described as like “a shell” which has been washed and hollowed by the waters of time. I think to understand the shell, we need to think intertextually. Consider, for example the image of the shell in “Song of the Happy Shepherd,” where Yeats imagines that the poet-shepherd reverses the Romantic image of the poet learning his meter by listening to the rhythms of nature by speaking into the “echo-harboring shell”:
Go gather by the humming sea
Some twisted, echo-harbouring shell,
And to its lips thy story tell,
And they thy comforters will be,
Rewording in melodious guile
Thy fretful words a little while,
Till they shall singing fade in ruth
And die a pearly brotherhood;
For words alone are certain good:
Sing, then, for this is also sooth.
The shell suggests the whorled ear of the listener (“I had a thought for no one's but your ears”), but also the whiteness of the poetic page.
The moon, in traditional misogynist texts, is associated with women, because it merely reflects the light of the “male” sun, because its face is changeable like women wearing makeup, because it is moody, because it pulls tides and is associated with the monthly tide of menstrual blood, which itself is associated with Eve’s curse of labor in childbirth. There might be a hint of male jealousy of the female power of birth in this poem, which is indicated by the double duty that the word "labor" does. Both Yeats and the women labor to make beauty, instead of to work the land and to give birth to children, and Yeats defend the labor of beauty, but it's possible that there might be a submerged critique of the fact that Eve’s labor becomes not the labor of childbirth in this poem but the labor to appear beautiful. This seems to keep the relationships in the poem at the level of juvenile attraction, not of mature of love and connection and family. Female creativity is presented as merely working the self to making it attractive to a man, but the exile in the poem comes because the man is attractive but his own labor is not enough to win the woman.
By metaphorically collapsing the shell and the moon together, Yeats presents in his poem a vision of the female as receptacle of masculine creativity. The repositioning of the moon of childbirth as a hollow receptacle for male poetic labor is a substitution for sex and impregnation, a substitution that ultimately turns out to be sterile, sad, as cursed as Yeats’ own doomed love for Maud Gonne.
