Adam's Song

“Adam’s Song” is inspired by the Abrahamic creation myth of the Garden of Eden. In the Christian tradition, the narrative of Adam and Eve’s creation and their expulsion from the Garden of Eden plays a central role; Walcott draws upon these narratives for the characters and themes of “Adam’s Song.” Like the Biblical account, the poem places a particular emphasis on the dynamic between Adam, Eve, and the god that created them. The poem is also keenly aware of the story’s role as a creation myth and consistently makes efforts to draw connections between contemporary humanity and their original ancestors.

Walcott goes beyond a simple retelling of this origin story; he expands and refreshes the Old Testament narrative by introducing Adam’s titular song. The poem’s song acts both as a connecting bridge between the Biblical narrative and the present day and as a celebration of earthly love, song, and art. In celebrating these earthly qualities, Walcott’s speaker suggests that they are superior and more fundamental aspects of human experience than the paradisaical garden where Adam and Eve were created. The poem’s use of rhyme, repetition, and Biblical allusion reinforce this message by suggesting that the Garden of Eden is not a “peaceable kingdom” of easy labor (Line 15) but instead a frightening and dangerous place that only could be transcended through love and free will.

The connection between Biblical narrative and the contemporary society is explicit throughout the poem and is one of the work’s major conceits. This connection is clear from the poem’s first stanza. The speaker begins the poem with a juxtaposition between the historical practice of “ston[ing] to death” an adulterer with the contemporary practice of social ostracization or the same immoral deed (Line 1). The continued judgment and execution of adulterers creates a clear line between the past and present. The contemporary social ostracization also proves that this connection works both ways, as Eve—both the “first” female and the first adulterer (Line 5)—is, along with Adam, ostracized from the Garden of Eden. It is tempting to understand the speaker’s use of adulteration as purely non-sexual, insofar as Adam and Eve are the only two humans in the garden. However, the speaker’s use of the word “horned” as a verb indicates that sexual adultery and adultery more generally cannot be separated (Line 6). Horns, when they appear on someone, are a conventional symbol that that person has been cuckolded. The speaker’s line that Eve “horned God for the serpent” (Line 6), then, suggests that Eve’s transgression (listening to the serpent that tempted her eat from the Tree of Knowledge) is the equivalent of cheating on God.

Beyond adultery, the poem also draws connections between the present and past through Adam’s song. The song, which makes up the poem’s entire final stanza, is presented as evidence of continuity. “Nothing has changed” (Line 9), the speaker states, because “men still sing the song that Adam sang / against the world he lost to vipers” (Lines 10, 11). The weight that the speaker attributes to the poem as evidence suggests, even before the song is heard, that it deals with human concerns that originated in Eden.

In particular, Adam’s song deals with love. The repetition of the word “heart” (Lines 22-24) and the clarification that the heart “lie[s] still” within Adam places a particular emphasis on human anatomy and on the heart as a conventional symbol of love. The song is sung “to Eve” (Line 12), who Adam refers to as “heart.” This nickname characterizes Adam’s unadulterated and pure love for Eve insofar as the heart acts as a simple and straightforward symbol for love. The connection between the heart and human anatomy also solidifies that Adam’s love for Eve is a human, embodied form of love.

Adam intends this song, and the love it portrays, to act as a defense “against his own damnation” (Line 13), and it seems to work to gain God’s sympathy. After the song “ascends to God” (Line 21), the divine being “wipes his eyes” with regret (Line 21). The speaker is unclear to what extent God’s sympathy reduces Adam’s punishment, but the original couple are nonetheless removed from Eden and the world that Adam “lost to vipers” (Line 11).

The vipers that populate the Garden of Eden in Walcott’s poem signify that the alleged paradise is actually quite dangerous and that, perhaps, Adam and Eve are better off for having left it. All of the non-human animals the speaker describes as inhabiting the garden are predators: the aforementioned vipers, the “serpent” that tempted Eve (line 6), and “panthers in the peaceable kingdom” (Line 16). The presence of so many predatory animals troubles the claim of peace in the “peaceable kingdom.” In fact, the naive Adam and Eve seem to be the predators’ most viable food source, an idea suggested by implicit connection between the panthers and the “death coming out of the trees” (Line 17). The suggestion that the garden is a dangerous and chaotic place is also reaffirmed by the mixed meter, lack of rhyme schemes, and inconsistent stanza lengths in the six middle paragraphs that describe the garden or take place in it.

The only end-line rhyme contained within these inner stanzas is that between “serpent” and “innocent” (Lines 6, 8). The association between the serpent and Eve’s innocence implies that the order lost in the other stanzas can be regained through shifting the blame from Eve to the serpent. The speaker also suggests the serpent’s blame when he states that the world is “lost to vipers” (Line 11). However innocent Eve may be, the speaker presents her adultery as justified insofar as it was done “for Adam’s sake” (Line 7). This emphasis on Adam and Eve’s reciprocal relationship ties back to the poem’s engagement with human love. Moreover, the speaker’s suggestion that the garden is an inhospitable environment might suggest that Eve’s transgression and the expression of her free will against God’s restrictions is the very thing that allows human love and expression to flourish.