Yeats

8 Pages 2111 Words

reality. The Abbey Theatre became his professional involvement. His bitter personal mood suited the stylings play-writting brought about in him. Yeats' poems held more conversational dramatic quality than they had ever before.
The casual, colloquial “Adam's Curse” is a good example of his stylistic development in this period. It is a pivotal poem in Yeats' stylistic evolution (the tadpole lost its ‘tail’ if you will) and perfectly illustrates his ‘new’ conversational manner while holding a few lashings of the dreamy, idilic, romantic period of his poetic conception. The ending of the poem is suggestive of Yeats' dreamy early style.

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.
“Adam's Curse” illustrates his new manner in several important ways. Primarily, it is a dialogue, seemingly casual and effortless. It is this perceived effortlessness which expounds the poet's theories of a conversational style.

Yet if it does not seem a moment’s thought,
Our stitching and unstitching has been naught.

Its easy conversational manner aside, “Adam's Curse” is constructed far more casually than the elegant, balanced, lyrics written before. The stanzas are of unequal lengths, there are a number of half-rhymes. A primary example of the challenging aesthetics and unconventionalism contained in much growing modern literature of the time. This was to alter and grow in different directions in Yeats’ later works. The precision and careful logic which Yeats commonly used in order to advance us from one point to another in relation to a central statement is maintained. An example is the progression from poetic labour to beauty's labour to love's labour. The poet’s labour is to seem smooth in h...