Adam's Curse Essay Questions

What does the moon symbolize in this poem?

The moon in this work symbolizes the eventual deterioration of all beautiful things, especially romantic love. The speaker notices that the moon seems to have been worn away by time, much as a shell becomes eroded by the ocean. He then notes that his own romantic relationship has fallen apart, or been unveiled as unsatisfactory, by time, mentioning that he feels as tired as the moon looks. This is a complex figurative relationship—rather than merely using the moon as a simile for his own tiredness, Yeats creates a tangled symbolic relationship, in which that tiredness is merely a symptom of a deeper degradation. Because the moon in literature tends to be associated with romantic love, its symbolism in this poem is especially charged, and carries with it the weight of that wider association.

How does Yeats make use of dialogue in this work?

The poem's first stanza is composed largely of direct speech, contained within quotation marks. Its shorter second and third stanzas dispense with dialogue and instead contain only the speaker's internal monologue. This alters the mood of the poem, which begins as a lively intellectual discussion before plunging into a lament about the speaker's romantic struggles. Moreover, it reflects the communicative barriers between the speaker and his beloved. The work begins with an exchange, not between the two of them, but between the speaker and his addressee's friend: the addressee herself never speaks. By the poem's end, even this one-way communication is absent, with the speaker addressing his beloved only in the form of the poem's second-person voice rather than by speaking out loud.