Better go down upon your marrow-bones And scrub a kitchen pavement, or break stones Like an old pauper, in all kinds of weather; For to articulate sweet sounds together 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. There have been lovers who thought love should be So much compounded of high courtesy That they would sigh and quote with learned looks Precedents out of beautiful old books; Yet now it seems an idle trade enough.
In the poem, Yeats describes the difficulty of creating something beautiful. The title alludes to the book of Genesisevoking the fall of man and the separation of work and pleasure. Ostensibly collaborating with one another, the 1st, 2nd, and 3rd stanzas are linked by an informal slant-rhyme scheme e.
Of its fourteen lines, the first thirteen are unbroken while the last is made of three iambs. These, in turn, are fulfilled through enjambment and bleed into the first line of the 2nd stanza i.
The 2nd stanza shares its first line with the last of the 1st stanza and maintains a similar form of non-repeating couplets. Its final line lies roughly coupled with the first line of the 3rd stanza i.
The 3rd and final stanza differs from its predecessors in its length. Constructed from eleven lines five heroic coupletsthe 3rd is significantly shorter than the others.
Summary Yeats serves as arbiter for his profession, condemning the view that beauty in art and, subsequently, everywhere else comes naturally. Rather, he supports the idea that beauty can only come about through great mental ardor.
Pitting himself with the "martyrs," the poet speaks through a victim's perspective and provides evidence to support his claim.
Yeats' poem, though at times mock-serious, makes a subtle plea for greater understanding of the creative process and those that make it their "trade. Susan Dick, Declan Kiberd; et al. Yeats" in Essays for Richard Ellman.Start studying Poetry Midterm. Learn vocabulary, terms, and more with flashcards, games, and other study tools.
consider Yeats‟s celebrated “Leda and the Swan”: 14 For a longer discussion. whose account of Nietzsche‟s symptomology I traced earlier.
and Yeats‟s model of antithetical poetics. causing the logic and rationality of an objectively reified world to reflect its irrationality.
one can not simply move beyond it.5/5(1). Yeats's Versification in Adam's Curse and the Wild Swans at Coole: A Comparative Study. William Butler Yeats. Adam's Curse. by William Butler Yeats.
Email Share; We sat together at one summer's end, That beautiful mild woman, your close friend, And you and I, and talked of poetry. I said, 'A line will take us hours maybe; Since Adam's fall but needs much labouring.
By time of the volume of there is a development visible in a very lovely poem, ‘The Folly of Being Comforted’, and in ‘Adam’s Curse’; something is coming through, and in beginning to speak as a particular man he is beginning to speak for man.
2 An Introduction to Meter W. B. Yeats is particularly fond of super-iambs, and they have been used effectively by William Wordsworth, John Keats, and Robert Frost.
There are several examples in Yeats’s “Adam’s Curse,”.