I love the way this supposedly simple poem conceals an invention that I think contributes powerfully to its effect. Most love poems take the dramatic form of an address from the lover-poet to the focus of his or her love, and many recount a conversation.

Unusual in Adam’s Curse is the social context in which the conversation is framed: that of a man with two women. This configuration carries nuances both erotic and chaste, and perfectly casts a conversation about the connection between love and labor, which women by nature understand better than men.

What can be said between two, cannot always be said among three, and so the first two-thirds of the poem carry a tone of restraint and delicacy--the socially acceptable tone, however intimate, of three people “making conversation.”

When this is finally violated and the lover addresses the beloved directly: “I had a thought for no one but your ears”--even though there is nothing remarkable about what he says, it comes with a nakedness and energy (the nakedness and energy we perfectly understand to be that of a Lover) which is revealed by virtue of the perfect foil Yeats created.

Focusing on “language” and “music”, as we always do, one might overlook what makes this poem actually happen.

I also love this poem, was ecstatic to see it this morning. Reading Robert’s essay and this post about the crowd of three made me think about how the complicated nature of the conversation between the poet, his beloved, her beautiful friend and centuries of readers – is indeed set up against the poem’s own lilting lines. The many underlying tensions - between art & chat, lyricism and natural, informal speech/humor, surface and more profound varieties of work and beauty – foreshadow two turns at the end. First, of course, is the veer from the explicitly social to the ostensibly private. The “for no one’s but your” ears marks a moment in the poem when art and chat meet directly, I think, since “your” means the ears of the beloved, but also implies our, the readers’, ears. What could be more artful, more simultaneously private and public? In that sudden second person pronoun is a complex invitation to us to join the dinner or the poem, or at least to watch and listen from a near-by place, privileged and titillated - half voyeurs, half participants. And it's that position that makes us so vulnerable to the second turn, the stunning resolution, when Yeat’s whisper into her and our ears turns out not to be a full-throated declaration of love – for her, or art, or beauty, or even poetry. Instead we all get the “weary-hearted” and “hollow” moon – cold and far away. That final line feels a bit like lost or ruined love – something we thought we had and then, in the end, did not.

Mark, I like your idea that this is ultimately a love poem --

What can be said between two, cannot always be said among three, and so the first two-thirds of the poem carry a tone of restraint and delicacy -- the socially acceptable tone, however intimate, of three people “making conversation.” When this is finally violated and the lover addresses the beloved directly --

but are you suggesting the speaker actually speaks to the woman at the end of the poem? For me, he's only thinking it.

even though there is nothing remarkable about what he says,

For me, what he says is pretty remarkable. Earlier, the speaker says,

It's certain there is no fine thing
Since Adam's fall but needs much labouring.

Yeats' finely crafted poem and the second woman's comment suggest that if you labor enough, you will be able to achieve that "fine thing," whether it is a poem or feminine beauty (wrought with powders, etc.) or love.

And the speaker implies he labored long "in the old high way of love," yet was unsuccessful. And that, ultimately, might be Adam's Curse -- that love does not come as easily as Milton says it did in Eden.

And then there's that last phrase -- we'd grown / As weary-hearted as that hollow moon. As Tonto once said, "who's this 'we,' kimosabe?" It seems to me the speaker in the poem is putting his own spin on their failed relationship. He's suggesting she tried as hard as he did to make the relationship work, and now they're both weary of trying. But perhaps she never really cared for him, and it's just the speaker who is weary and

worn as if it had been a shell
Washed by time's waters as they rose and fell
About the stars and broke in days and years.

This poem has always puzzled me. Is Yeats saying that there is a failed love affair between the speaker and the beautiful friend whose ears he invokes at the end? Which to me makes the poem about the failure of poetry to console for the loss of illicit love that dies out despite all the laboring. Why have the triangle otherwise? I've always felt sorry for the less attractive silent second woman--who must be furious because she can at least sense the poet's yearning in his sotto voce final stanza. Please correct me.

I too love this poem and no matter how many times I read it, I always find that turn from public to private speech (detailed wonderfully by Turpin and DeWoskin) in the two posts above) surprising and stunning. I’m curious what people make of the change in registers proceeding that turn. The first two stanzas are decidedly public, full of common idiom and social contexts. The end of the second stanza mocks the language and aspirations of young, would-be lovers. Then, the third stanza seems to take up that very language—it’s full of poetic, romantic language (“washed by time’s waters as they rose and fell…). It’s not the common, public idiom of the earlier stanzas, nor the private utterance of the last, yet it seems essential for allowing the poet make his final revelations. Perhaps a second sort of foil?

As for the “We,” I’ve always thought of it as inclusive: that all three (and perhaps us too?) had tried to make love, in its various forms, work.

I think the failed love affair was between the speaker and the other woman, addressed as you, who says nothing.

Bottomfish and Terese Svoboda, Yeats pretty cleary addresses the woman he loves, you, in the second person, from the very first sentence: "your" friend in line 2 and "you" in line 3. He also addresses her in the thought for only her ears at the end: that "you" are beautiful. The entire poem is addressed to her (though it is courtly to her friend).

Both women are "beautiful," says, but he says it about "you" in an intimate way, maybe from deeper inside? Though with a past-tense "were" that may be ambiguous? (You were beautiful as I thought it? Or, you were beautiful when I strove? My conviction is that he absolutely and completely continues to find her beautiful-- the weariness the more mysterious and powerful therefore.)

(On the other hand, he uses the same, arguably worn or perfunctory adjective, about old books! Maybe the skyscape description, the silence, lets him go into himself enough to use the adjective in a more heartfelt or urgent way?)

Mainly, for me "you" is "you" and there's only one "you," each time I say this poem to myself. The beautiful mild woman is suitable for someone else to love, but she's a bystander.

Mr Pinsky,

I see no disagreement between what you say and what I say. In the conversation at summer's end there are three people:

the poet

the beautiful mild woman

the woman whom he used to love (and in her mind still does until the revelation at the end), and the beautiful mild woman is her close friend.

By the way, MaryAnn, this poem comes right before Red Hanrahan's Song About Ireland in the Collected Poems - as fate would have it. I put up a post nearby suggesting that the curse here is Pride, which no classical formality, by itself, can overcome in a foolish young man. Of course I must be right about that, 'cause I'm so smart and stuff.

Thank you Bottomfish, that is clear.

I wonder what you and others think about the repetitions of "beautiful" -- an adjective that might seem to be avoided. Does it have in part an effectively "hollow" quality, foreshadowing the conclusion in which being beautiful and recognizing beauty do not protect against weary-hearted-ness?

I agree with Bottomfish. There has to be a dramatic reason why the third character is in the poem. It's obviously not as witness to the declaration. And the "you" is so silent.

There has to be a dramatic reason why the third character is in the poem.

Perhaps because Yeats felt that Gonne would never say something like

"To be born woman is to know —
Although they do not talk of it at school —
That we must labour to be beautiful."

Also, as someone noted, having three people in the scene makes an academic discussion of poetry more plausible than if it were only the speaker and his former lover.

When you get down to it, a lot of the language is rather trite -- not just "beautiful", but also "sweet", "fine thing", "heartache", "love", "old books." A similar issue is that the language is highly general. There is no description of the surroundings, or description of the women themselves, or how they happened to be sitting with him. The reason is that details are not needed. The poem is is rather like a Platonic dialogue. We don't need to know what Socrates looked like.The characters are embodiments of general concepts: the poet, the lover, the beautiful woman.

I agree with your comment that the hollowness of "beautiful" implies that the word functions ironically. By constantly insisting on beauty, we are led to weary-heartedness. In this sense only, "Adam's Curse" is like "Ode to Autumn" where the incessant use of words of fullness -- " fruitfulness", "maturing", "load", "fill", all the way to

Thou watchest the last oozings, hours by hours

we get to the end of the last stanza:

And gathering swallows twitter in the skies.

So, after exhausting all the fullness we can find, we are left with the empty skies. In general, by insisting on one thing, you lead the way to something like the opposite because nothing more is left

I wouldn't go so far as to say there was an affair between the speaker and the "beautiful mild woman" in the poem, but there does seem to be at least an implied comparison between her and the woman who is the "you." If one is a "beautiful mild woman," the other (presumably Maud Gonne) is perhaps a beautiful fierce one. Perhaps there is a mild rebuke to the beloved that if only she had been a bit milder herself, things might have worked out better, although if she had been milder, perhaps she would not have been so loved. The speaker is able to say things ("There have been lovers ...") to the mild woman that are an indirect commentary on his love for the other woman, things he cannot or would not say to her directly because of the criticism of her they imply (that if she had been a bit "milder" like her friend, she might have appreciated his "high courtesy" more).

Yeats is perhaps my favorite poet, but ultimately I have to say I just don't think this is one of his best poems, at least not for me. I may have the chronology wrong, but I think it's correct that this was written after Yeats' earliest poems like "The Lake Isle of Innisfree," but well before his later poems like "No Second Troy" or "Leda and the Swan," poems that show a much less mild view of love. For me "Adam's Curse" is a transitional poem, one whose awkwardness shows why Yeats had to leave behind the "sweet sounds" of his early poems in order to write his great later poems. The bitterness of "No Second Troy" ("Was there another Troy for her to burn?") makes an interesting contrast with "Adam's Curse" in its attitude toward presumably the same love.

there does seem to be at least an implied comparison between her and the woman who is the "you." If one is a "beautiful mild woman," the other (presumably Maud Gonne) is perhaps a beautiful fierce one. Perhaps there is a mild rebuke to the beloved that if only she had been a bit milder herself, things might have worked out better, although if she had been milder, perhaps she would not have been so loved.

Yes.

And yes, "Adam's Curse" was written, I think, when he was 37. But even years later, in writing "A Prayer for My Daughter" he said --

An intellectual hatred is the worst,
So let her think opinions are accursed.
Have I not seen the loveliest woman born
Out of the mouth of Plenty's horn,
Because of her opinionated mind
Barter that horn and every good
By quiet natures understood
For an old bellows full of angry wind?