"Adam's Curse" is a poem by the Irish poet W. B. Yeats. Originally published in the 1903 collection In the Seven Woods: Being Poems Chiefly of the Irish Heroic Age, the poem uses the scene of a conversation on a summer night as a vehicle to meditate on beauty, art, and love. Over the course of the poem, the speaker reflects on the biblical expulsion from Eden, characterizing the fall from paradise as a curse that limits beauty and necessitates backbreaking work in its pursuit. Eventually, the speaker turns to more personal matters, revealing a disillusioned attitude toward love itself. In addition, the poem mines an ironic aspect of beauty, contending that beauty must appear effortless and yet cannot be created without enormous effort.
While the poem is not entirely autobiographical or confessional, it contains traces of autobiography. It is thought to reference a conversation between Yeats, his onetime lover Maud Gonne, and Gonne's sister Kathleen. However, the identities of these figures are altered or veiled in the work. Gonne, and her tumultuous relationship with Yeats, is a central preoccupation in many of Yeats's works (especially those focused on Romantic love).
This poem is written in iambic pentameter with an AABBCC rhyme scheme. It contains a long 27-line stanza, followed by a sestet (six-line stanza) and a quatrain (five-line stanza). Its somewhat childlike formal features, particularly its rhyme scheme, as well as the simplicity of its diction belie an understatedly complex and rigid structure and thematic content. In this way, the poem enacts that which it describes—the apparent effortlessness of beauty, as well as the care required to achieve that effortlessness.
