Romantic Disillusionment

“Adam’s Curse” follows the gradual disillusionment of the speaker and their friends in a changing society. While the poem’s first stanza is grounded and conversational, there are hints of the slow turning of time and the fading of light in the setting; the friends are sitting at the end of summer and at the end of a day, two ways in which light is disappearing from the world. They talk about the way poetry is perceived by their contemporary society, which now seems to be run by “bankers, schoolmasters, and clergymen” (Line 13). This cultural shift, the speaker argues, has infected even the art of romance: “Yet now it seems an idle trade enough” (Line 28). At this point the three friends fall silent, as though looking back on lessons learned through life with the perspective of experience. In their silence, they “saw the last...