Dec 23, 2009
William Butler Yeats’s “Adam’s Curse,” written in six uneven stanzas of iambic pentameter rhymed couplets, recounts one of the poet’s meetings with Maud Gonne, a free-spirited Irish patriot and sometime actress who was just returning from an extended trip abroad. Maud’s sister, the “beautiful mild” Kathleen, was the third person present, but the personal situation is mildly altered in the poem. Maud, identified only as “you,” is said to be the younger woman’s “close friend” rather than sister.
After setting the scene—three friends at...
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