Summary
The subject of love causes the group to go quiet. They sit in silence and watch the last of the daylight disappear. The rising moon looks like a shell that has been eroded over time by water. A thought occurs to the speaker, though it is intended only for the poem's listener. The thought, he says, is that he would like to love her in the beautiful and artistic way of old-fashioned lovers. Though they had once been happy, that happiness has been revealed as an illusion, and the two of them now feel as tired as the worn-out-looking moon.
Analysis
While the poem's first stanza is relatively long, with a buildup of momentum over the course of its lines, stanzas two and three are short and abrupt. This clipped form conveys a certain fraying or breakdown, with the fluency of conversation giving way to a halting, hesitant tiredness. Meanwhile, the dialogue that characterized the poem's first stanza gives way to silent reflection. While the speaker is still thinking about the "you," his beloved addressee, he cannot voice his thoughts. Communication seems to have broken down. Overall, these closing stanzas depict a disillusioned attitude, not merely about the abstract and intellectual concerns that were the focus of the poem's earlier stanza, but instead about the speaker's own love life.
The poem's beginning focused on Adam's Curse as a broader problem plaguing humanity, approached with intellectual distance. Now, however, the speaker's distress appears to have a more urgent personal dimension. The assertion that lovers no longer study "beautiful old books" in particular seems to point to a conviction that his own feelings of love for the listener are out of place in modernity. The effort and artistry required to create this type of beauty are impossible, or are too exhausting to be sustainable.
At the same time, the poem itself serves as a final, ironic touch. Even as the speaker wistfully wishes to love in the "old high way," suggesting that love as an artistic pursuit of beauty has given way to something more cynical and corrupted, he addresses his thoughts to his listener in the form of a poem. Despite its simplicity, this work is also self-consciously beautiful and stylized, packed with fanciful figurative language, imagery of nature, and formal complexity. In other words, even while bemoaning the end of beauty in love and his own exhaustion at the prospect of cultivating that beauty, the speaker dedicates a beautiful artistic work to his lover. Thus, the end of "Adam's Curse" is characterized by an unsolved internal conflict. Even when disillusioned and cynical, the speaker seems unable to deny his own instinct to work toward beauty and love.
