William Butler Yeats was an Irish poet of some acclaim, whose work I first ran across in a book of . . . well, of Irish poetry. Somehow, I managed to stumble onto his poem entitled “Adam’s Curse”.
As I reread the poem yet again, I recognized that there was much more wisdom entailed within: In order for anything to be valuable, work must be put into it.
The title, “Adam’s Curse,” hearkens back to Genesis chapter 3, in the Old Testament of the Bible. Adam and Eve, in the Garden of Eden, have just partaken of the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil, which had been forbidden to them, and the Lord has appeared to them to mete out the consequences. Among other things, as he instructs the couple they will have to leave the Garden and go out into the world, he tells Adam, “By the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat thy bread.” In other words, unlike the Garden, wherein fruits grew spontaneiously and were readily available, if Adam and Eve wanted to eat, they would have to work.
Likewise, as Yeats points out, nothing good or worthwhile in this world comes without effort. (And, he notes, perhaps he should have put more effort into something he hoped to value.)
This ought to be obvious. Whether it is a woman’s beauty, which definitely takes effort, from all our machinations in order to perfect hair, make-up, and wardrobe, not to mention working out to maintain our figures, in addition to the social graces we must learn . . . or whether it is writing a poem . . . or creating a lasting relationship . . . All things which become valuable (or beautiful, as the poet states) require work. As I tell my children and my students, “Nothing worth having is free.”
But many people, particularly young people, think, as I did, that everything depends on talent. (Or luck. Or both. Roll the dice.) When faced with the assignment to write an essay or a research paper about a potential career, many of the students want to choose careers in sports or performance. They give lip service to the idea that, yes, they would have to work for these careers, but they do not actually put in the real effort which would be required of them, perhaps even eariler than their current age, if they intend to reach the level of which they dream.
Even one of my daughters, as a high school student, repeatedly brushed off the cautions we gave her about her desire to be a singer. “Honey,” we told her, “it is entirely possible you could be a singer, but you would have to pay the price. There is a price, and only you can decide if that price is worth it.”
We told her of other performers, who practiced their guitars after school until their fingers bled. We told her of people who kept trying over and over and over, after failure after failure after failure, facing down people who told them they could never make it, until they finally had one small chance. And even then, sometimes that small chance didn’t pan out.
“If you are willing to put in the work,” we said, “you might be able to reach this goal. (Because in the performance arena, there is an element of luck, too.) However, what you are doing now, watching YouTube videos for most of the afternoon, will not get you there, no matter how much talent you have.”
The irony of the title “Adam’s Curse” is that although many people do view the requirement to work as a curse of some sort, it is actually through work that we gain our greatest joys. For instance, with my poetry writing, I have found I actually enjoy the work of searching for a phrase or a word or an idea to build upon. There’s something wonderful about struggling and succeeding to produce something about which one can feel satisfaction. Have you seen the face of a teenager as he received his first paycheck from his first job? How about the elation a student feels when she has struggled on a trigonometry assignment and found she earned full credit? What smiles break forth as a track relay team realizes they had a state-qualifying time? Our self-esteem does not come from accomplishing things which were easy, but from meeting and surpassing challenges which require us to work.
Yeats does an excellent job of communicating this idea in his poem. Each time I read it, I can’t help but admire his turn of phrase, the way he leads to the idea as in a casual conversation, and the way he applies it to his own situation. And although I can’t remember exactly how many times I have read it, I return to it again and again.