Review of Yeats’ poem ‘Adam’s curse’

 

Review of Yeats’ poem ‘Adam’s curse’

I request readers to read the poem first from this link--https://www.poetryoutloud.org/poem/adams-curse

and then only my review.

Is the male at a receiving end at times? If so when? What about a male made of finer fibre, sensitivities and creativity, say a poet? He might labour for hours to carve out one line of a poem, but how other males find him? Let’s read these lines:

Is to work harder than all these, and yet   
Be thought an idler by the noisy set
Of bankers, schoolmasters, and clergymen   
The martyrs call the world.’

In the same vein Yeats find a compulsion thrust upon a woman from time immemorial, that is, to look beautiful:

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

If there is such an endless pressure on a man and woman in different ways, won’t it wear them out and make all their genuine romantic feelings for the opposite sex? The answer is at the end of the poem:

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.

 

While choosing the theme ‘man-woman’ or ‘romance’ the challenge is, if the poem has nothing different and forward from the scores of poems on ‘love’, the piece will be lost in that crowd. So we need to see whether this poem is layered and whether there is anything subtle for the reader to appreciate. In the first stanza highlighted above, there is a mention about peers finding a man an ‘idler’; the expression ‘we must labour to be beautiful’ in the second stanza above, tells us there is societal pressure on a woman this way. The depiction that both a male and a female are victims of societal norms and judgements makes the reader understand that the issues that look subjective are actually objective. A backward minded judgmental society chokes the individuals and if they end up too drained and empty it is attributable of how the materialistic outlook of a society can kill genuine gentle feelings of love, art and poetry. The poem’s strength is what Yeats left unsaid.