Course:Adam's Curse by W.B. Yeats

I said, ‘It’s certain there is no fine thing/ Since Adam’s fall but needs much labouring.

Adam's Curse by WB Yeats was published in 1903 in his collection In the Seven Woods, but I found it in one of the first books of poetry I ever bought for myself: a small 'Collected Works' from the discount shelf at Chapters. I was far too young to understand it, this meditation on fading love, but I did get that it was about the craft of writing.

We sat together at one summer’s end,
That beautiful mild woman, your close friend,
And you and I, and talked of poetry.
I said, ‘A line will take us hours maybe;
Yet if it does not seem a moment’s thought,

Our stitching and unstitching has been naught.

This is where it starts. But soon, the poem takes a conversational turn into the labour of beauty and of love. The whole way through, Yeats is rhyming couplets in iambic pentameter (heroic couplets), but then suddenly, he splits one in half, real casual-like:

Yet now it seems an idle trade enough.’

We sat grown quiet at the name of love;
We saw the last embers of daylight die,
And in the trembling blue-green of the sky
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 in days and years.

And here, again, Yeats splits a couplet and there is another intimate shift to what remains unspoken:

I had a thought for no one’s but your ears:
That you were beautiful, and that I strove
To love you in the old high way of love;
That it had all seemed happy, and yet we’d grown

As weary-hearted as that hollow moon.

The first time I read this poem I didn't like it. I didn't like what I read as its cynicism. It stayed with me, though, I think because it's one of the first times I encountered a poetic turn. The pause of white space, the sudden hush that falls between the characters, the ironic twist, surprised me. I wanted to do this to my own audience, and it remains my goal. I know I must labour and strive to make art that feels natural and surprising. Yeats maybe wanted to teach me something about love that I wasn't ready to learn, but I did absorb the poetry lesson.

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