Summary
The speaker addresses a listener and recalls sitting together, with the listener and one of her friends, one summer day. When the topic of poetry arose, the speaker observed that poems require painstaking work, with a single line taking hours. However, the poem itself needs to seem spontaneous, and if that impression of spontaneity cannot be achieved, a poet might as well do hard manual labor. In fact, the seeming effortlessness of much great poetry is exactly what makes many respectable, professional people look down on poets as lazy. After this, the friend, who is beautiful and charming, mentions that women undergo a similar process in the pursuit of beauty: they work hard to look effortlessly beautiful, though this work isn't taught in school. The speaker responds that, ever since the fall from paradise, humankind has been cursed with the burden of working hard to create beauty. In the past, he says, lovers studied old books to create beautiful romances, although this now is viewed as a frivolous pursuit.
Analysis
Over the course of this single long stanza, Yeats reveals precisely what he refers to with the phrase "Adam's curse." An allusion to the book of Genesis, in which humankind is banished from Eden and forced to work, the poem specifically characterizes the curse in terms of the way it renders beauty scarce. Whereas, in an Edenic paradise, beauty would be plentiful (Yeats implies), the world we live in instead necessitates that people work to create beautiful things. In order to make this case, however, Yeats has to counteract a fundamental problem: the fact that readers are likely to understand objects of beauty (whether poetry, femininity, or love) as luxuries, associating them with leisure and even thinking about them in contrast to the drudgery of work. Rather than elide this rhetorical obstacle, Yeats runs headlong into it, acknowledging that poetry and other beautiful things can at their best seem natural and easy. This, he says, is in fact yet another cruel paradox of Adam's curse. The most beautiful things seem effortless, but behind the scenes, a great deal of effort is required to create that impression of effortlessness. Figurative language has a major role in this stanza's persuasive power. In order to argue that creating beauty is hard work, of the variety associated with Adam's biblical punishment, Yeats draws analogies between poetry and various other forms of labor, all of them physical: sewing, scrubbing floors, or breaking rocks.
Yeats's own poem—that is to say, "Adam's Curse,"—does in fact have an effortless, nonchalant quality. Simple diction, straightforward figurative language, and a fairly flexible and natural-sounding iambic pentameter meter make the work easy to read. Its tone is conversational (and in fact, much of it consists of recounted dialogue from an intimate conversation). This makes the poem itself a case study in the paradox discussed within it. The ease of reading it, and its apparent spontaneity and nonchalance, are in fact a carefully constructed illusion based on hours of hard work. Yeats, in order to prove this point, allows the work behind the poem to show through in small ways. One way is through rhyme. The poem has an AABB rhyme scheme, in which each line rhymes with the one below it. This gives the impression of a certain rigidity or artificiality—one that is only increased by the stanza's final line. This line rhymes with the first line of the subsequent stanza, creating a long moment of unresolved rhyme. This creates a temporary feeling of unease and suspense, which illuminates the fragility of the poem's carefully-constructed form. Furthermore, the poem's fourteenth line is split in half by a caesura. This, too, introduces a disruption to the poem, highlighting the strictures that otherwise hold it together.
The work's caesura and the idiosyncrasies of its rhyme scheme also suggest a certain disruption or disillusionment. This sense that something is personally wrong will soon become central to the poem, though the speaker hints at it by mentioning the degradation of love in the final lines of the stanza. Thus, while this opening stanza as a whole focuses on broader problems with art and beauty, Yeats begins to ease us into a more intimate conversation about lost love.
