Poetry Break: "Paradise Hoped"

Adam and Eve

Franz von Stuck (1863-1928)

German Symbolist Painter

(Image from Uzi Dornai)

Yesterday, I promised to "post another poet's different interpretation of the expulsion" from the Garden of Eden that one reads in Milton's Paradise Lost. I suppose that today's poem keeps that promise . . . but not in the way that I'd anticipated.

In short, I'm posting my own poem, an aesthetic response that I composed yesterday to A.D. Hope's poem "Paradise Saved" -- which you'll need to read first to understand my poem:

Paradise Hoped

In minus four-oh-oh-and-four A.D.
Declinéd Man to eat with gracious Eve,
So beateth hope eternal to deceive
The Man for not partaking of that tree
From pride that goeth ever toward a fall
That cometh not in manly Paradise:
Adam and Eve were but a pair of dice
That came up snake eyes, even to appall.

Odd then that Eve receive a help to meet
Her all forlorn upon the dusty ground,
While Adam, wedded not to other Eve,
Forever hopeless hope-filled breast to beat
In loving dirge to love with mournful sound:
"Woman," whose woe he clove but could not cleave.

Such was my response to Hope's hopeless poem -- hopeless for Adam . . . and differently hopeless for Eve.