WRFH/Radio Free Hillsdale 101.7 FM - The Poetry Fix: Adam's Curse

Episode Date: October 18, 2025

Today, Erika Kyba reads "Adam's Curse" by William Butler Yeats. Yeats muses on how all beautiful and lovely things require labor...and how this laboring after the beautiful has become an "idle trade" in the hollow age of modernity.

Welcome to the Poetry Fix on Radio Free Hillsdale 101.7 FM. I'm your host, Erica Kaiba, bringing you your weekly fix of poetry from across time. Today we're reading Adam's Curse by William Butler Yates. This poem portrays a conversation between the narrator, his lover, and her friend, talking together at one summer's end. The fact that this conversation is taking place at the end of summer is going to be important. It implies decadence, the end of the growing season, and the beginning of the decay that comes with fall.

Decadence is the shadow that hangs over the poem, the second half of Adam's curse. The first part of Adam's curse is summed up in two lines in the middle of the poem. It's certain there is no fine thing since Adam's fall but needs much laboring. The three characters have been talking about the difficulty of laboring to understand a poem, to be beautiful, and to pursue love. Yet the difficulty is juxtaposed with the fineness in these laborious pursuits. poetry, beauty, and love are each noble, attractive ends.

However, there's a turn towards the end of the poem, as Yates sadly observes that love and courtship used to require much labor, but have now become an idle trade. And he concludes with the desire to strive in the high old way to court his lover, but finds that he and his companions have grown weary-hearted as the hollow moon. It seems that modernity has hollowed out all of the world's most glorious pursuits of their meaning, And we've seen this angst among the modern poets in previous episodes, especially in Eliot's poetry. And this is the second unstated half of Adam's curse.

Everything decays and dies in a fallen world. In Yates's imagination, it's not only people that die, but ages which pass away. He longs for a richly meaningful bygone era, finding himself instead at summer's end, and at the beginning of a season of hollowness and decadence, a season which can be identified with modernity itself. So Yates has done us the favor of identifying a crisis of meaning in the modern world and pointing out the difficulty of striving to regain the high old ways. I think it's worth asking, though, what the solution to the crisis is, if a solution does exist.

Yates raises the question, but just because he doesn't leave us with a neat resolution, doesn't mean that there is no answer. With all that said, let's dive in. Adam's Curse by William Butler Yates. 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, yet if it does not seem a moment's thought, or stitching and unstitching has been not. 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. And thereupon that beautiful mild woman, for whose sake there's many a one shall find out all heartache on finding that her voice is sweet and low, replied, To be born woman is to know, although they do not talk of it at school, that we must labor to be beautiful. I said, it's certain there is no fine thing since Adam's fall, but needs much laboring. There have been lovers who thought love should be so much compounded of high courtesy that they would sigh and quote with learned looks, precedence out of beautiful old books. Yet now it

seems an idle trade enough. We sat grown quiet at the name of love. We saw the last embers of daylight die, and in the trembling blue-green of the sky, a moon, worn as if it had been a shell washed by time's waters as they rose and fell about the stars, and broke in days and years. I had thought, for no one's but your ears, that you were beautiful, and that I strove to love you in the old high way of love, that it had all seemed happy, and yet we'd grown as weary-hearted as that hollow moon. You've been listening to The Poetry Fix with Erica Kaiba. If you enjoyed this episode, consider following the Poetry Fix on Spotify, YouTube, or Apple Podcasts. And if you have any poems you want to see in a future episode, email your suggestions to The Poetree

at gmail.com. Join me next week and we'll be reading The Battle of the Bulge by Robert W. Service.