The Birthday Party Play by Harold Pinter

 

The Birthday Party

Play by Harold Pinter

This task given by Yesha Ma'am. In this blog I embed our video about this task in which we are going to recreate Act 2 in an Indian context.

About Harold Pinter

(10 October 1930,24 December2008)

Harold Pinter was a British playwright, Screenwriter, director, and actor. He was considered as one of the most renowned dramatists of the 20th century, esteemed for his inventiveness, originality, and formal innovation. His work is so influential that his name has been used to explain certain settings or situations the "Pinter Pause" concerns relying on unsaid things to convey characters' motivations or personalities, and the effect named  "Pinteresque" refers to an inconclusive end to a comedy of subtle menace and absurdity.

 His work was influenced by Samuel Beckett, whom Harold Bloom identified as Pinter's "ego ideal."

He wrote his first play, The Room, in 1957. It features many motifs that would be common in his oeuvre, including a situation that seems quotidian but is charged with ambiguity and menace. It was reviewed favorably and was mounted by the drama department of Bristol University. Pinter then went on to The Birthday Party, a play of muted anxiety and tension that bordered on the theater of the absurd. This play soon produced at Cambridge's Arts Theatre to critical success. The play bombed during its London debut a few months later. Despite that failure, The Birthday Party remains one of Pinter’s most successful full-length plays, and it is considered the first of his “comedy of menace” pieces.

Pinter  also wrote many plays in the 1970s, his many earlier works were more than enough to cement his reputation. This decade saw Old Times (1970), No Man's Land (1975), and Betrayal (1978). He was the associate director for Britain's National Theater.

In the 1980s-2000s, He continued to compose plays but also tried his hand at poetry, screenwriting, and directing. He explained that he wanted to look at politics at the end of his life, and he remarked that his twenty-nine plays were enough. In 2005, he was awarded the Nobel Prize in literature.

The Birthday party

'The Birthday Party' is Harold Pinter’s second full-length play; it was written in 1957. The male protagonist of this play is Stanley Webber. Stanley is the only guest at Meg and Petey’s guesthouse. He becomes perturbed when he is told that new people are coming to stay. His Life at a rundown seaside boarding house is disrupted by the unexpected arrival of two mysterious and sinister strangers called Goldberg and McCann, who terrorize him and eventually take him away.

When The Birthday Party was first staged at the Lyric Hammersmith in 1958, at that time most of the reviews were  negative and the play closed early. The exception was Harold Hobson in the Sunday Times, who believed in the play and championed Pinter. Fifty years later, the play’s anniversary production was staged at the Lyric Hammersmith. 

Goldberg and McCann claim that Stanley has suffered a nervous breakdown, and the play ends with them taking him away. Petey makes an attempt to stop them, but they threaten him too.

Irving Wardle famously described the play as ‘a comedy of menace’, while Pinter’s biographer, Michael Billington, calls the play ‘a cry of protest’.

Recreate Act 2 in indian Context

We recreate act 2 in which we take a scene when McCann returns with some bottles, which he sets down on the sideboard. Stanley again insists they should leave that house, but this time, Goldberg and McCann respond aggressively, insisting Stanley sit down. McCann insists forcefully, but it is Goldberg's quiet, threatening tone that effectively inspires Stanley to acquiesce.

After some time they  begin to interrogate Stanley with a series of both unnerving and seemingly unrelated questions, Stanley gets frustrated and screams loudly. This play has been classified as a comedy of menace, characterized by Pinteresque elements such as ambiguous identity, confusions of time and place, and dark political symbolism, and that's why we create this video with many Hindi memes which create many confusions, and also we can find some dialogues where no such meaning.

Here is link of our video which we made in indian context.

Thank you for visit.✨

Trends and Movements

      Trends and movements

Thinking Activity

This task is given by Yesha Ma'am. In this blog I am going to write about Surrealism, Dadaism and Expressionism, and I will attach my work based on these three movements.

Dramatic movements of the early 1900s.

The 19th century is an important period in literature because in this period major upheaval things happen, not just in America but across the world. The terror of the first world war sparked a sense of disillusionment that was only fueled all the more by stock market crash, the Great depression and world war 2. People started to shift on humanity and created art, music and literature. Surrealism, Dadaism and Expressionism are part of 1900s century movements, and these movements are totally different to each other.

What is art according me

I believe that art is something that makes your soul happy. If you are an artist you are always willing to make new art pieces, you always wanted to make something unique. You express your feelings through your art piece, many great artists believe that art piece is as important as thought behind it. In your art field you always wanted to get mastery and always willing perfection. For this every artist should  learn continuously. At the end I wanted to say that for me art is something that makes my soul happy and calm.

Surrealism

Surrealism is an artistic movement that has had an impact on various things like on painting, sculpture, photography, literature, film.

Surrealists were inspired by Sigmund Freud’s theories of dreams and the unconscious that believed insanity was the breaking of the chains of logic, and they represented this idea in their art by creating imagery that was impossible in reality, juxtaposing unlikely forms onto unimaginable landscapes.

Surrealism art represents something which is creative and unique, and it never disappears.

The beginning of Surrealism

This movement originated in France 1920s and this movement considered the development of Dadaism. Dadaism was a nihilistic movement in art and literature started in Zurich in 1916 by a Rumanian, Tristan Tzara, an Alsation and others.

This movement formed as early as 1917, inspired by paintings of Giorgio de Chirico, he captured street locations with a hallucinatory quality. Then after 1917 he abandoned this style, but his style made an impact on Dadaist Max ernst.  Max Ernst moved to Paris in 1922 as Dadaism ended and it was the beginning of Surrealism.

The painters of Surrealism 

Many painters joined this  movement in the 1920s. Yves Tanguy was a writer and his  work de Chirico inspired him to teach himself to paint in 1923. Tanguy specialized in infinity dreamscapes featuring ambiguous figures,  Alberto Giacometti was a Swiss sculptor who met Masson in 1928. He was influenced by African and Egyptian art, which he combined with the dreamlike aesthetic to create bizarre, stylized figures.

Salvedor Dali

Salvedor Dali was a Spanish painter, He  joined the Surrealist movement in 1928. He captured the attention of Sigmund Freud, who preferred his work to any other Surrealist.

His most paintings feature self-torturing psycho-sexual undertones depicting what Freud characterized as the unconscious manifesting within the conscious world. His paintings border on illusion, employing a realistic draftsmanship that brought him long-lasting worldwide popularity.

One of his most famous paintings, 1931’s The Persistence of Time, features melting clocks draped on a desolate landscape.

In short, Surrealism was a revolt against all restraints on free creativity, included among the restraints to be violated were logical reason, standard morality, social and artistic convention and norms.

Here I wanted to put my Surrealism art.

Interpretation of the painting

This painting (Philosopher's Lamp ) is a surreal oil on canvas painting by artist René Magritte. This painting Completed in 1936. Here i made this drawing with single black pen.

The painting is a self-portrait. The man in the painting is looking at  the audience through rather sad looking eyes. He has a pipe in his mouth, and his nose is painted to be much bigger than his other features. His nose looks more like an elephant trunk. It is buried into the pipe he is smoking. There is a table next to him with a lit candle meandering down the table. The candle is a representation that although sometimes life is not clear, one can try to at least see the imperfections clearly.

Here I wanted to add a youtube video of one surrealism painting and also other surrealism painting.

 

Dadaism

Dadaism was a revolutionary art movement in the early nineteenth century. This movement represents a response of the modern age. During the first world war many artists, writers and intellectuals opposed the war and they shifted to Switzerland. These artists working in Zurich, Switzerland, Dadaism quickly became an international movement that spread throughout Europe and the U.S. with centers in Paris, Cologne, Berlin, and New York City. The art, poetry, and performances created by Dadaist artists make an impact on avant-garde art in Europe.

This movement was an artistic and literary movement in Europe and the United States that began in the early twentieth century during the cultural and social upheaval following the first World War. Dadaism represents art as illogical, irrational, and absurd. Most Dadaist artists create collage, montage, and assemblage of disparate elements to create their art. These artists are left-wing political views and created work that questioned every aspect of society and culture. Dadaism brings  several trends and artistic movements that occurred in Europe, including Cubism and Futurism. One of the first artists to be associated with the Dada movement was the French sculptor Marcel Duchamp. In the early 1910s, he coined the term “anti-art” to describe his readymades.

Here are some major characteristics of this movement.

Characteristic of Dadaism

• Dadaism art made from found objects like images and readymade things.

• Nonsensical things we find in Dadaist art. This art features irrationality, humor, and silliness. 

• Dadaism is Spontaneous art.  It made playing with the elements of chance and encouraging spur-of-the moment creativity. At Dada shows, poems would be created by cutting words out of a single sheet of newspaper, scattering them on the ground, and then randomly organizing them onto a page.

Francis Picabia

Picabia was a famous Dadaist, he was a French printmaker and painter who often created spontaneous conceptual works. In his Dadaist self-portrait Tableau Rastrada, he collaged elements from found media to create an image depicting himself as a social-climbing playboy.

Here I put my Dadaism work, which I made with various pictures taken from a newspaper.

My Interpretation of this collage

I made this Dadaism collage with various cuttings of newspaper. The viewer can see many human pictures in this collage. There is a panda who has a human head, a lady playing piano who has a man's head, and a beautiful wing. Viewers can also find a lady who has a hand in her mouth and one painter painted that hand and one little boy felt amazement to see that. There is also a girl who is playing, and has a white wing which I drew with a weight pen. So viewers can see many things in this collage.

Expressionism

At the start of the twentieth century, an artistic tendency swept through Europe, spurred on by resistance to bourgeois culture and a fervent search for rejuvenated creativity. It came to be known as Expressionism. Many Words that characterize Expressionist artists and Expressionist art are ‘self’, ‘psyche’, ‘body’, ‘sexuality’, ‘nature’, and ‘spirit’. The term is so elastic that it can accommodate artists ranging from Vincent van Gogh to Egon Schiele and Wassily Kandinsky. Together, these artists tapped into very raw, true, and eternal questions, topics, and struggles that had been stirring beneath the surface and which remain familiar to us even today.

Expressionism spanned various fields: art, literature, music, theatre, and architecture. Expressionist artists sought to express emotional experience, rather than physical reality. Some famous Expressionist paintings are Edvard Munch’s The Scream, Wassily Kandinsky’s Der Blaue Reiter, and Egon Schiele’s Sitting Woman with Legs Drawn Up. 

In France, the Dutch artist Van Gogh was digging deep and revealing his unusual, troubled, and colorful psyche; in Germany, the Russian Wassily Kandinsky was exploring spirituality in art as an antidote to alienation in the modern world; in Austria, Egon Schiele and Oskar Kokoschka were fighting society’s moral hypocrisy by tackling topics such as sexuality, death, and violence; finally, Edvard Munch was making waves in Norway and all over Europe with his wild, intense expressions of the environment and his self and psyche.

Interpretation

Here I wanted to put my Expressionism art. Here I made a Vincent Van Gogh painting as my Expressionism work. In his face I put many colored round lines which create an illusion.

Here is my another Expressionism drawing, and painting.

Word- 1442

Picture- 11

Video- 1

Thank you for visit.

The Waste Land - Thinking Activity

                  The Waste Land

Thinking activity

This blog is a thinking activity given by Dr.Dilip Barad sir. In this blog i am going to illustrate allusions of indian thoughts in 'The wast land' by T.S.Eliot. 

The poem 'The wast land' is regarded as one of the most important poems of the 20th century and this poem is the central work of modernist poetry. This poem was written by T.S.Eliot and published in 1922. This poem has 434 lines, and first appeared in the United Kingdom in the October issue of Eliot's The Criterion and in the United States in the November issue of The Dial. This poem was published in book form in December 1922. Some of most famous phrases of this poem are like-

"April is the cruelest month"

"I will show you fear in a handful of dust" 

"Shantih shantih shantih"

This poem's title is given by mistake as "Waste Land" (as used by Weston) or "Wasteland". However, in a letter to Ezra Pound, Eliot politely insisted that the title was three words beginning with "The".

This poem 'The Waste Land' is divided into five sections. The “Burial of the Dead” introduces the diverse themes of disillusionment and despair. The second is “A Game of Chess” and the third, “The Fire Sermon,” shows the influence of Augustine and Eastern religions. The fourth is “Death by Water” and the fifth and final section is “What the Thunder said,” which features the influence of Indian thought on the Poet Laureate.

T.S.Eliot

T.S. Eliot (Thomas Stearns Eliot)  was born in St. Louis, Missouri, of an old New England family. He was a poet, essayist, publisher, playwright, literary critic and also editor. He was educated at Harvard and graduated work in philosophy at the Sorbonne, Harvard, and Merton College, Oxford. He settled in England, where he was for a time a schoolmaster and a bank clerk, and eventually literary editor for the publishing house Faber & Faber, of which he later became a director. 

One of his most famous poems is 'The Waste Land', which appeared in 1922. For this poem Eliot won the Nobel Prize in 1948. In this poem he employs literary and cultural allusions from the western canon, Buddhism and Hindu upanishads.

Allusions of The indian thoughts in 'The Waste land'

In the mid nineteenth century Indian thoughts became subject to interest for many western writers. Many western writers are influenced by Indian thoughts and they reflect their thoughts into their works. When T.S. Eliot arrived at Harvard, it became a famous center for oriental studies. His mentors included Irving Babbitt and George Santayana, who were instrumental in his developing an interest in Indian scripture and philosophy. 

Eliot started studying Pali and Sanskrit as part of his interest in Hinduism and Buddhism. Eliot said, 

“Long ago I studied the ancient Indian languages, and while I was chiefly interested at that time in philosophy, I read a little poetry too, and I know that my poetry shows the influence of Indian thought.”

A Universal Solution

Through these influences, Eliot concurred that the conundrum of the mechanical spiritual death could not be solved only by the West, and needed a universal solution. Eliot himself not considered as western influencer but in this poem he draws indian religion to reinforce themes in The Weste Land.  

It is no surprise then that the headings for two of the five sections of the poem are derived from Indian sources, alongside the symbolism of the Grail Legend and the Fisher King. In a true modernist style, the poem features abrupt changes of speakers, place and time, portraying the dissonance that is emblematic of its subject matter. It also interweaves scenes from contemporary British life into the labyrinth of these myths and higher thoughts. 

The Five sections

The Burial of the Dead

The first section, called The Burial of the Dead, talks about the rejuvenation of modern humanity with the drop of rainwater. The poem says: 

April is the cruelest month, breeding

Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing

Memory and desire, stirring 

Dull roots with spring rain. 

This line drawn from the Buddhist text, Dhammapada, this thought can be traced back to Gautam Buddha, who suggests growing a Boddhi tree in his heart by becoming spiritually aware of his existence. 

This is the first line of the poem serves as a reminder of the wastland which is dead. T.S. Eliot's presentation of life in death reminds of the concept of maya. Basicalky maya is the illusion that leads people to believe that the world is made up of things separate and distinct and blinds them to the reality that life is in fact an unfired whole. Indian philosophy teaches us that it is ignorance of this unity.

A Game of Chess

The next section, A Game of Chess, is a contemporary exploration of the degradation of marriage and sex in modern society.

The Fire Sermon

The third section, called, The Fire Sermon, is derived directly from a sermon of Lord Buddha. This section focuses on fighting temptations on the path and overcoming desire to lead to nirvana. Here, Eliot draws not only from Buddha’s idea of escapism, but also from St. Augustine.

Eliot was so greatly influenced by Buddhist phylosophy that he decided to entitle the third section of the poem as 'The Fire Sermon'. In his sermon, lord Buddha peaches "all things are on fire", the eyes are on fire, forms are on fire, eye consciousness is on fire.

Death by Water

The next section titled, Death by Water. The poem begins on a banks of the Themes and ends on the banks of river Ganga. The wastland shows exaple influence of the Rig Veda.

This poem opens with a description of Nature, and the illusions of indian rituals are the whole foundation to the poem. Here water occupies an important place in wastland. The illusion to water in the section 'Death by Water' has an overtone of the Hymns of the Rig Veda.

In his essay called The Upanishad in the Wasteland, G. Nageshwara Rao writes that -

 “Drought throughout Eliot’s poetry is metaphor for despair, doubt and need for spiritual certainty. Just as water is taught by thirst, the need for nourishing faith is taught by a restless state of doubt in which one can neither stand or lie nor sit.”

The Word of the Thunder

The last section of the poem  The Word of the Thunder, is totally based on the Upanishads. The Brihadaranyaka Upanishad alludes to Prajapathi, the creator, talking to his three offsprings—Devtas, Demons and Men, reiterating the cardinal virtues of Damyata (Restraint), Datta (Charity) and Dayadhvam (Compassion). The voice of the thunder ends on a positive note when the poem ends with the command, “Shantih, Shantih, Shantih.” Eliot wishes peace upon all, even the wastelanders who are gripped by fear.

One of the most important Hindu influences on the "Wasteland" is the idea of non-dualism. Hindu philosophy teaches that all of life is a unified whole that only appears to consist of separate objects due to human ignorance of its true nature. Hindus believe that all suffering comes out of this ignorance and that the highest goal in life is to experience the unity of God on earth. This is done by giving up the illusion of a separate self in order to realize the divinity of the inner Self, which is not separate from God. This is the theme of all the Hindu Upanishads, including the "Brihadaranyaka Upanishad."

In a letter to Bertrand Russell, Eliot described the last section as, “not only the best part but the part that justifies the whole.” This statement is not only revealing but extremely powerful because it sums up the immense power of the Vedas and Upanishads that form the structural matrix of the poem. While this is not an Indian poem per se, its strong message of the power of Indian philosophy still resonates a hundred years on. And perhaps will, for many more centuries.

The concluding line Shantih, Shantih, Shantih, of the poem makes Eliot's vedic reference more explicit. Eliot wants the word to know that the chanting of Shantih thrice is both neutral as well as a religious activity in the vedic way of life.

So to conclude we could say that in this poem T.S. Eliot included many Indian thoughts and allusions.

Thank you.

The Act : On Yeat's Poems

 The Act : On Yeat's Poems

This blog is a thinking activity assigned by Dr. Dilip Barad sir. In this blog I illustrate W.B.Yeats' two poems 'Death', 'Adam's Curse' 'and also try to describe my own interpretation of the poems. 

W.B. Yeats

William Butler Yeats is Widely considered to be one of the greatest poets of the 20 th century. He belonged to the protestent, Anglo Irish minority that had controlled the economic, political, and social, and cultural life of Ireland since at least the end of the 17 th century. He received the Nobel prize for Literature in 1923.

He was born in Dublin, Ireland in 1865, he was the oldest child of John Butler Yeats and Susan mary pollexfen. Yeats spent much of his early years in London, where his father was studying art. He afterwards became a distinguished painter. He was educated in London and at the high school in Dublin, later studying art at the metropolitan school of art and the Royal Hibernian Academy school. 

When he was young he was reading Dante Alighiery, William Shakespeare, John Dante and the works of William Black and Percy Bysshe Shelly, recommended by his father and inspiration for his own creativity. He was influenced by Standish James O'Grady and Sir William Ferguson.

 William Butler Yeats published his first works in the mid 1880s while he was student at Dublin's Metropolitan school of art. His early epic poems such as 'The  Wanderings of Oisin' were published in 1887, and other poems (1889) and such plays as 'The Countess Kathleen'(1892) and 'Deirdre'(1932).  He died in 1939. 

Here are some of his best poems-

• Meru

• Leda and the Swan

• The song of Wandering Aengus

• He wishes His Beloved Were Dead

• When you are old

• The Circus Animals Desertion

• Lack Isle of Innisfree

• The sad Shepherd

• The Second Coming

• Easter, 1816

• Death

• He Wishes for the Cloths of Heaven

• Adam's Curse

Death

Introduction 

'Death' is one of the most famous poems by W.B.Yeats, this is probably the shortest of all his finest poems. In just a dozen lines, Yeats the writer of the poem examines human attitudes to death and contrasting them with an animal's ignorance of its own morality. This poem was written in 1929 and included in Yeats 1933 volume 'The Winding Stair and other Poems'.

Poem

Nor dread nor hope attend

A dying animal;

A man awaits his end

Dreading and hoping all;

Many times he died,

Many times rose again.

A great man in his pride

Confronting murderous men

Casts derision upon

Supersession of breath;

He knows death to the bone -

Man has created death.

Analysis

The first part of the poem simply tells the truth that we are human and we are unlike other animals. Here in this poem Yeats compares mans awareness that he will die with an animal's lack of awareness of this, and an animal doesn't fears death because it has no concept of dying, and also not any hopes for life after death as man does, consoling themself through religion that death will not be the end. For this yeats writes

Many times he died,

Many times rose again

There are many symbolic deaths we go through in life, many times men break down emotionally and mentaly but they have to  rise again and continue their life.  

This kind of sentiment or thought put forward by William Shakespeare in Julius Caesar that 'Cowards die many times before their deaths. The brave experience death only once.' Humans die in their lives many times, through failure or facetime failing in life in other senses. Many times we get another chance to make our lives good. This line indicates another line that 'A great man in his pride'.  A great man, one who has to deal with, and confront, men who commit murder has learnt to ridicule man's fixation upon death, which is described as mere superssion of breath. 

The poem then suggests an ambivalence when we breathe our last breath on this earth, do we merely replace one kind of existence with another ?  Not that these questions trouble the great Not that these questions trouble the ‘great man’ Yeats mentions: he ‘knows death to the bone’ and knows that ‘Man has created death’ – that is, death is a man-made concept. For this J.K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone said this line that -

“To the well-organized mind, death is but the next great adventure.”

Of course, Yeats is not denying that men die; what he is rejecting here is the notion that death or mortality is something we should dwell too much upon.

Every creature on the earth has to die one day. An animal dies, just like a man; but an animal does not live its life with fear about death, and also they don't know about the concept of afterlife. Religion gives the concept of afterlife, if humans do good karma they get a good life after death, but if they do many sins they have to suffer in their afterlife. 

To indicate the ‘great man’ Yeats refers to in ‘Death’ is Kevin O’Higgins, an Irish politician who had been assassinated in 1927 (O’Higgins has overseen the execution of several IRA men, which had made him very unpopular among the IRA). But Yeats’s poem is not, of course, rigidly wedded to its political context, and makes a general point about man’s attitude to his own mortality. How can we forget that one day we will die?

Adam's Curse

Introduction

"Adam's Curse" is a poem written by William Butler Yeats. He reproduced some of the finest poems in English literature. This poem is in contrast to his style and this poem written in a simplistic manner with use of iambic pentameter. In the poem, Yeats describes the difficulty of creating something beautiful. Yeats originally included the poem in the volume In the Seven Woods, published in 1903. This poem gives him great recognition like other poems.

Poem-

We sat together at one summer’s end,

That beautiful mild woman, your close friend,   

And you and I, and talked of poetry.

I said, ‘A line will take us hours maybe;

Yet if it does not seem a moment’s thought,   

Our stitching and unstitching has been naught.   

Better go down upon your marrow-bones   

And scrub a kitchen pavement, or break stones   

Like an old pauper, in all kinds of weather;   

For to articulate sweet sounds together

Is to work harder than all these, and yet   

Be thought an idler by the noisy set

Of bankers, schoolmasters, and clergymen   

The martyrs call the world.’

                                          And thereupon

That beautiful mild woman for whose sake   

There’s many a one shall find out all heartache   

On finding that her voice is sweet and low   

Replied, ‘To be born woman is to know—

Although they do not talk of it at school—

That we must labor to be beautiful.’

I said, ‘It’s certain there is no fine thing   

Since Adam’s fall but needs much labouring.

There have been lovers who thought love should be   

So much compounded of high courtesy   

That they would sigh and quote with learned looks   

Precedents out of beautiful old books;   

Yet now it seems an idle trade enough.’

We sat grown quiet at the name of love;   

We saw the last embers of daylight die,   

And in the trembling blue-green of the sky   

A moon, worn as if it had been a shell   

Washed by time’s waters as they rose and fell   

About the stars and broke in days and years.

I had a thought for no one’s but your ears:   

That you were beautiful, and that I strove   

To love you in the old high way of love;

That it had all seemed happy, and yet we’d grown   

As weary-hearted as that hollow moon.

Analysis-

This poem is simple but this is autobiographical, this poem conatains love, labor, and time. This poem is about suffering as a human compared to his situation in life, and also tries to understand the beauty of women. Yeats wrote Adam's curse during the year 1902 and that was the time when he tried to win the heart of Maud Gonne, but his efforts were not successful, which many critics believed to be the curse of writing the poem.

In the very first stanza the poet speaks about words that are meant to impress and how they can be ignored without a second thought. This is true in case of personal expressions and verse meant for universal reading. Here Yeats put the bankers, clergymen, and schoolmasters would consider who compose verses as idle meaning that there is no use of them in the world, because it is a curse itself.

Second stanza, Yeats gives out the view of a woman who believes that woman labor more than anyone talks about. Here the poet mentions Adam's Curse as a pioneer to all labor that mankind has to suffer. This is the point where the speaker accepts that being a woman requires hard labor too. In the same stanza Yeats criticized the form of love in the society. He mentioned that love was classical and required labor. Modern society sees love as an "idle trade".

In the last third stanza, the speaker replies to the criticism regarding love and poetry. His words are only for the ears of his beloved and his expressions serve the purpose of loving her in the classic way. But just as the moon has become a hollow shell washed by time his love too has become hollow and they got weary of the methods. This too indicates the labor of the speaker who, despite having the choice, chose to travel in the traditional way and win over the heart of his beloved.

Structure-

This poem is composed of three stanzas of heroic couplets, 19 couplets total. In this poem some of the rhyming are full like years/ears and some are only partial like clergymen/thereupon. The first, second and third stanza are linked by an informal slat rhyme scheme.