The mock-heroic interpretation, which I for one have been suggesting, depends on the assumption that Yeats had, somewhere within him, some hidden grain of humility. That may be an insupportable leap. What I'm thinking is that here the new, wiser, modernistic Yeats is poking a little fun at the self-absorbtion of the younger, more foolish pre-raphaelite Yeats of a few years earlier - though not at the content of what he says. I agree the bend is gentle.

Once in Rapallo at dinner with Ezra Pound and Pound's informal student Basil Bunting Yeats recited Bunting's "I am agog for foam" to the company. Bunting was less than half his age and would remain almost completely unknown for another 35 years. Is this "humility"? There's a different Yeats showing here than the druidical bard on the BBC tapes. Or is there? Somebody who knows Yeats’ biography can maybe correct or modify it, but I have the impression that although by the time he wrote Adam’s Curse he had known MG for almost 20 years, he didn’t see her at all regularly over the entire period. There were long stretches when he didn’t see her at all and then would encounter her again to discover again how completely she knocked him over. And again be rejected. I imagine this sense of time passing, and passing in repeated futililties, shows in her comment about the need it creates to “labor to be beautiful,” in their common weariness, and in A moon, worn as if it had been a shell Washed by time's waters as they rose and fell About the stars and broke iin days and years. * Falcon, was MG an Anima Girl?

She was an actress, and a big part of being a good one is knowing a good role when you see it. Here was a man with a thousand poetic ships to launch, looking for a face. I think of an Anima Girl as someone who mysteriously accepts projections, and by all reports she was a pretty solid character, but...an actress. What fascinates me is that in the poem, she is so..still. Remember, though, he's not here to report facts.

Yeats had real friendships with women throughout his life, and wrote poems about many. It's hard to see a real Anima Girl refusing a guy over politics. Maybe, as he sometimes thought (or says he did) she just didn't understand him...

That had she done so who can say
What would have shaken from the sieve?
I might have thrown poor words away
And been content to live.

..or understood him too well.

Jim thank you for the Bunting story which I didn't know. (It's the close friend, or in some accounts fictionalized younger sister, who makes the comment about laboring to be beautiful, not the woman he strove to love, etc.)

Incidentally, I'm continuing to admire and recommend Substrate.

Thanks, Robert. I'm hoping it will keep finding readers. It's easy to see why Yeats would like the verse of "I am agog for foam" and to imagine him relishing its sensuality. Falcon, I agree about MG's "stillness" in Adam's Curse. I think it's partly because Yeats hadn't given up on her -- really -- yet. The sense of weariness, of hollowness in the poem, is partly about being polite, talking around things, keeping an emotional distance. And then the moon makes her commentary. I was thinking more of the Anima Girl as Inspiratrix -- by turns Siren and Maria stella maris -- she who volatilizes projections and "accepts" them like the North Atlantic does the Titanic -- . But I project. * Van Morrison's obscure collection of outtakes, Philospher's Stone, includes a setting of Yeats Crazy Jane On God worth a listen. It is preceded by a Robin Williamson tune about Dylan Thomas and followed by a setting of some poetry of Peter Handke's, both also tasty. But the Yeats & the Belfast Cowboy ...

What discussion of lunar tunes and anima/animal girls would be complete without Lucia Pamela, recently featured (as a character) in a Tony Kushner play. She recorded this on the moon, playing all the instuments. She said so.

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Well, it's clear that it's less confusing to jump in earlier. There are so many posts that i got dizzy trying to keep the various points in mind. So, excuse me if I repeat or summarize: I hope to say something new.

Genesis and the expulsion is about the loss of bliss--the oneness of body, mind, and spirit--and the limiting acquisition of self-consciousness. When Adam and Eve were naked but didn't know the cerebral connotations of nakedness they were in harmony with themselves and with their God. When they "ate knowledge" they became self-conscious. No one can fault the Hebrew tribes for being against the acquisition of knowledge (although this part of the Bible is bar none one of the worst anti-female tracts in all of religion) but the bliss of the body has been violated, suggesting perhaps an ancient reverence for the unity of mind and body and spirit.

Adam's curse, as it relates to poetry and love in this poem, seems to be the curse of self-consciousness, the ascendancy of the labored over the spontaneous or natural. The speaker talks about the labor it takes to make a line seem spontaneous. The value here is on the natural and the spontaneous, the thing as it is without self-consciousness. The fall is the labor it takes to do that--and it can be done (obviously!). The grace is when it just happens. And that also happens in poetry. It also happens in beauty--so many women and people are just beautiful without effort, however we define beauty.

The speaker's "you" is the beautiful one. As Robert notes, it is an astonishingly moving and intimate moment when the artifice falls away and the speaker says the deepest, least self-conscious thing for one person's ears only (remember that Elizabethan love poetry was for the beloved, rather than for the public). Wow. How many times has anyone spoken to us that way, male or female? The past tense does not signify that she was merely beautiful in the past: it follows grammatically from "I had a thought"--meaning that I had a thought that you were beautiful. Gut. Passion. A deep recognition of beauty that has nothing to do with labor or artifice.

We have to take the poem on the page as the reality the poet was trying to create. I agree with Robert: this feels like the kind of passion he had for Maud Gonne. In the world of the poem, however, the speaker laments pursuing the "old high way of love." This echoes the "high courtesy" of the stale, formulaic, self-conscious loving the poem seems to repudiate. But here I think Yeats may have deviated from his own life story to go back to other impulses the poem is following. (Or, he once felt this way about his wife and blew it!--but as TR Hummer notes, be cautious about biography). The bliss comes from unity of mind and body and from the absence of self-consciousness. Robert and others nailed that moment in the poem. If we hit that note in our poems and in our relationships, or if a poem or a friend, lover, whoever, does that for us, well, we are in Eden.

The fact that at that moment the speech is plain, pure, blunt--albeit not labored over as in the other passages, nor quoted (rather interior)--is testimony to its rare nakedness. It's why it moves us. The question is: when did someone last speak to you so nakedly? When did you last hear it in a poem? When did you last write such a thing?

So many helpful and interesting posts about this poem, on not only its plot and meaning but also its scansion, rhyme, idiom, vocabulary, tone, the historical facts behind it! Thank you, Robert, for putting this one up and getting us all going, and urging us on, with your stimulating comments and generous and humorous replies. I've learned a lot from the whole discussion and will print out many of these posts for possible use in the classroom. It's fascinating to see how many of us have been moved by this poem and bewitched by its beauty. I've loved it too, ever since my high-school English teacher gave me a copy of Yeats _Collected_ and since a college boyfriend read it aloud to me -- a gesture I thought so romantic until, the last few lines echoing in my head, I realized what he was trying to say was It's Over. Much as I like the poem and admire its incredible craft, though, I do, like Robert Thomas, feel irritated every time now I encounter the lines about how it's harder to write poetry than get down on one's "marrow-bones" and "scrub a kitchen pavement." Many of those who posted here wondered about various aspects of Yeats' life -- does anyone think Yeats ever scrubbed a kitchen pavement? I doubt he did. As someone who's both worked as a maid and written poems, I'd have to say that working as a maid should probably generally be considered the harder and less rewarding job no matter how much one stitches and unstitches one's lines of verse. And this leads me to one criticism I remember of Yeats by Auden, somewhere in _The Dyer's Hand_, where Auden said he had trouble believing some of the things Yeats said in his poems. But I'm very glad we've all had a chance to hear this astonishing poem and consider it, and savor it again, in this forum.

So much that Yeats wrote - songs, plays - was meant to be heard. His poems are never far from that. His enchanting recitations are so close to singing. Robert mentioned that his recording this week was from memory. It's not a new idea, but refreshing.

"The old high way of love," the "high courtesy" from "learned books" partly refers to the poetry Yeats was writing up until In The Seven Woods (1904), where Adam's Curse appears. Adam’s Curse was a new departure even among a book of new departures. This is not The Fiddler of Dooney. It is the least “Celtic Twilight” and the least “lyric” among the shorter poems in the collection. Yeats is working hard to be casual, and conversational, and to do narrative. All three are new to his work and the poem’s narrative machinery grinds its gears a little. The better we know the poem the less we notice that it's hard to tell at the beginning whether there are three or four characters – is “that beautiful mild woman, your close friend” one or two? – we figure out, but if it matters we shouldn’t have to. We don’t know for sure till the end the gender of “you,” leaving the siuation of address unclear. It helps to read it in its original context following The Folly of Being Comforted, The Arrow, Never give all the Heart.

Teresa Cader,

This is really a response to a post by Mr Pinsky to which he referred me, as part of a discussion over the supposed misogynistic background of "Adam's Curse". I had disagreed with Tony Barnstone's post titled "The Labor of Beauty and Our Exile from Love". This is what Tony Barnstone said:

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.

Now I took the liberty of inquiring of Tony what these misogynist texts were, since I was not aware of them. He referred me to an elementary text called Shakespeare: the Basics, and also quoted some lines from Romeo and Juliet. Upon referring to the Shakespeare text. Nor did the quoted lines seem to me to prove that Shakespeare entertained any of the stereotypes of femininity of these "misogynist texts". In response. Mr Pinsky referred me to your post. So now I am going to take the liberty of disagreeing with what you wrote here:

No one can fault the Hebrew tribes for being against the acquisition of knowledge (although this part of the Bible is bar none one of the worst anti-female tracts in all of religion) but the bliss of the body has been violated, suggesting perhaps an ancient reverence for the unity of mind and body and spirit.

I say that before we call the story of the tree of knowledge one of the worst anti-female tracts of all religion, we consider the following:

St Augustine lays the responsibility for the Fall on Adam, not Eve. The reason is that woman was after all created as Adam's companion and helpmate but not as the decision-maker. Moral responsibility devolved on Adam, so he could not say the woman offered him of the tree. This is stated in Romans 5:14: "But death held sway from Adam to Moses, even over those who had not sinned as Adam did, by disobeying a direct command -- and Adam foreshadows the Man who was to come." Augustine repeats this, explicitly stating that the sin was Adam's.

So much for the Christian point of view. Among the Jews, the interpretation is apparently the same, as I find in The Religion of Israel by Yehezkel Kauffman. (I'm using the abridged English translation of 1960.) He says on pp.292-3:

...(Gen 2:4-4:26) portrays man as a uique creature, the darling of God, set in God's garden to cultivat and enjoy it. Animals are created to keep him company and be his help. Woman, too, is given him not for procreation but to be "a help meet for him." Only one restriction is placed on him: he must not, on pain of death, eat of the fruit of the "tree of knowledge of good and evil."

Here, again, the respnsibility is clearly Adam's. If this adds up to " bar none one of the worst anti-female tracts in all of religion", you may want to look at the Koran.

My point here is that "Adam's Curse" is not an expression of misogynistic stereotyping. The poet converses with women representing a traditional female orientation, but that doesn't imply misogyny.

Is what is being read as misogynist Yeats’ portrayal of the woman as being overly concerned with physical appearance? When I think of an example of misogyny in poetry, I think of Eliot’s draft of “The Waste Land” where one finds in “The Fire Sermon” the following lines that were wisely edited out by Pound (37-40):

This ended, to the steaming bath she moves,

Her tresses fanned by little flutt’ring Loves;

Odours, confected by the [cunning] French,

Disguise the good old [female stench.] artful hearty female stench.

Even the trochaic rhythm of that “artful hearty female stench” seems to sonically enact the speaker’s emphatic disgust. If we compare those lines with Yeats’ rather innocent

(to my mind) placing of the worn cliché “You have to suffer to be beautiful” in the mouth of a female speaker in “Adam’s Curse”—especially if it’s there as a bridge to get to the thematic center of the poem, love—I think we go too far with our efforts to indict a poet who is writing at the turn of the century and not today. We live (and read) in an era where historical correction of previous very real slights, injuries, and restrictions, makes us vigilant about scouring a text for evidence of misogyny but I don’t find it in “Adam’s Curse.”

Bottomfish, et all re misogyny in the Bible --

I taught some excerpts from Milton's "Paradise Lost" a few weeks ago and was reminded that a lot of our "received wisdom" about Adam and Eve comes from Milton rather than Genesis. I think more received wisdom from from Augustine and other religious interpreters of the Bible.

I recommend going back to Genesis itself.

Of course, that does not solve the question of where Yeats got his own received wisdom. Nor does the Bible necessarily clear up what Yeats himself meant to be Adam's curse.

Jim Powell, I graduated from college before postmodernism became the Next Big Thing in academic circles. But I was curious as to what I had missed.

It was only recently, in recommending to a friend a book I had read some years ago to sate my curiousity, "Postmodernism for Beginners," that I realized you were the author. I found the book both understandable and helpful. Thanks very much for writing it.

Bottomfish, thank you for following my suggestion that you read Teresa Cader’s post. You have enriched the broth!

if I understand correctly, the dispute between you and Teresa is about Genesis, rather than “Adam’s Curse” itself-- and, I suppose, the remote cultural undertones or vibrations associated with the moon. Misogyny in the poem itself is a kind of false trail, I think-- and not Teresa’s point if I understand it.

But I would like to overhear a debate between you and Teresa about Genesis! (What you say does seem to win your argument with Tony Barnstone about Shakespeare, etc.)

Mary Jo Bang provides a wonderful example of real, heavy-duty misogyny by a modernist! The Eliot lines, demonstrating again how much thanks TSE owes EP, remind me of Swift’s weird, brilliant and repulsive Lady’s Dressing Room poem and Lady Mary Wortley Montague’s scabrous and brilliant poem in reply to Swift. (I’ve thought of making those the occasion for a “Classic Poem” discussion -- but decided the whole thing was just too revolting!)

Like Teresa (eg, when she wonders how much floor-scrubbing WBY had ever done) and many others here, Mary Jo recognizes an element of superficiality in the conversation: laboring to be beautiful, etc.-- just the kind of things a semi-serious conversation like this might include. (I can picture engaging in one, this way, myself.)

What I think Teresa describes movingly is the “naked” words of the ending, how Yeats manages the transition to plain truth-- spoken in the poem, not in the conversation-- and makes it grow, somehow, of what has come before.

As Jim Powell says, “Adam’s Curse” is partly about “being polite, talking around things, keeping an emotional distance” . . . that’s what makes the revelation or discovery Teresa describes full of emotion for me. The movement from the external and sociable, to the skyscape, to the stripping-away of even high-grade chatter: that’s what strikes me: and I must say that my sense of a poem I know very well has been deepened and refreshed by the Poetry Fray's unusual bringing-together of readers’ voices-- web monikers and recognized names.

As MaryAnn has often pointed out, a unique forum.