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.
