"Paradise Saved" by A.D. Hope

Tech woes: Audio cuts out briefly at 11:56. Sorry! 

Topics discussed in this episode include: 

-Please send all your John Forbes and Jane Kenyon hate mail to Alice at poetrysayspod@gmail.com 

-My upcoming Poetry Says episode on Gwen Harwood and my role as the prosodic gadfly/mustache-twirling villain of contemporary poetry. 

-Read my poem "The Virtue of Corinthian Columns" here .

-Read my poem "Thalassic Hymn" here . 

-The show will be on hiatus in June! Sorry :(

-Let's get Versecraft in the classroom! 

-Join my bookclub forum on "The Sailor Who Fell From Grace With the Sea" here

-Alice's brilliant episode on Australian poetry culture, Funny Ha Ha 

-Cultural Cringe 

-Be the Poseidon of the tides of fashion

-The Curious Case of the Third Foot Trochaic Substitution

-Counter-factuals reveal the actuals.

-A bit of ribbing

-It's about time we talked metonymy

-Pride and Punishment

-Eliot's "The Wasteland," and the line he stole from Tennyson

-Hypallage returns!

-Not Donald's justice, but God's justice.

-"Hell is more than half of paradise" 

-Adam has no rizz.

-Theravada vs. Mahayana Buddhism

-All you need is love, and whatever else Aristotle said.

Text of poem:

Paradise Saved

Adam, indignant, would not eat with Eve,

They say, and she was driven from his side.

Watching the gates close on her tears, his pride

Upheld him, though he could not help but grieve,

And climbed the wall, because his loneliness

Pined for her lonely figure in the dust:

Lo, there were two! God who is more than just

Sent her a helpmeet in that wilderness.

Day after day he watched them in the waste

Grow old breaking the harsh unfriendly ground,

Bearing their children, till at last they died.

While Adam, whose fellow God had not replaced,

Lived on immortal, young, with virtue crowned,

Sterile and impotent and justified.

Transcript

Versecraft Episode 3-9: “Paradise Saved” by A.D. Hope 

This episode is dedicated to my dear friend Alice Allan, whose favorite poet of all time is A.D. Hope, and definitely not John Forbes, or, God forbid, Jane Kenyon. Speaking of Alice, next week she’ll be putting out an episode featuring yours truly on her marvelous podcast Poetry Says, so keep your ears peeled for that. Alice and I will be talking about a mischievous and dazzling poem by one of the greatest Australian poets not named A.D. Hope, namely, Gwen Harwood, as well as some of the controversy and kerfuffle surrounding my remarks on my infamous Case For Meter and Rhyme episodes. It should be a lot of fun, and hopefully I’ll be able to provide the link for you to that on next week’s show notes. 

What I can provide the links for this week are a couple of poems of mine that were recently published, if you’re curious to read them—both can be read in a matter of seconds, so don’t be discouraged by time constraints. The first is an epigram entitled “The Virtue of Corinthian Columns,” which was recently posted on Asses of Parnassus, and the second is a short poem I wrote many years ago soon after I first started writing poetry seriously, entitled “Thalassic Hymn” which was just put out by The Amethyst Review. As I tell everyone who asks me where they can find my poetry, it’s only been in the last half year or so that I’ve been actively sending my work out, so the first things are just starting to appear now, and I’ll have a few more exciting things to announce as the months continue to roll on. For now, I’ll remind you all that next week is my self-indulgent week where I analyze one of my own poems, so you can look forward to that as well, or skip it entirely, as the case may be. 

One thing that I’m looking forward to is that next month I’ll be traveling to Greece and Spain: specifically, to Thessaloniki, Crete, Madrid, Barcelona, and the Pyrenees mountains. Because of this trip, I unfortunately have to put Versecraft on hiatus during the month of June. I’m very sorry about that, but rest assured that the show will come roaring back for a new season in July. In the meantime, you can listen to all the Versecraft episodes that you haven’t gotten around to, or you can listen to the wonderful podcasts that I recommend in my show notes. 

On a completely different note, I’m very pleased to announce that Versecraft has made its first foray into the classroom, something I’ve been hoping for from the very beginning. Professor Cooney, whom I mentioned last week, devoted one of his classes at Ivy Tech Community College to featuring one of my episodes. Thank you so much, Jack. To any of my other listeners who are educators in the humanities, and I know there are a few of you out there, if you have any interest in showing Versecraft to your students, please, please do, you have my full consent. If you have any questions, please email me at versecraftpodcast@gmail.com. 

Ok, just one more thing before my weekly prostration for financial assistance. I’d like to invite you all, if you’re interested, to sign up to join the online, forum-style bookclub that I co-host at Loganberry Books. This month I’m running the discussion page, and have chosen Yukio Mishima’s beautiful but disturbing novella, “The Sailor Who Fell From Grace With the Sea.” It’s a quick but very powerful read, and I’d highly recommend it to any of you who enjoy contemplating the ocean, the human condition, the dangers of Romanticism, and the nature of masculinity. Check out my link in the show notes for more information. 

Alright, the time has come. I cordially invite you all, new listeners and old, to please consider donating to or becoming a member of Versecraft. Creating this show amounts to a second job for me, and while I’m always happy to do it for free, being able to be professionally compensated for it one day would make my life a good deal easier. Every little bit truly makes a difference, so please don’t be shy even if you just want to make a one-time donation. It’s easy to do at my link in the show notes, and I very much appreciate it. You too, dear listener, can be my mini-Maecenas, my micro-Medici. If you can’t or don’t want to give right now, please consider taking a moment this week to tell someone you know about the show whom you think might like it. With nerdy, niche podcasts like this, the best PR is word of mouth, and it really helps to grow the show.

That’s quite enough admin for one episode, so let’s move on and get to the poetry already. Today’s poet, Alec Derwent Hope, who lived from 1907 to 2000, was, along with the aforementioned Gwen Harwood, the most illustrious modern practitioner of formal verse in Australia. Hope lived a long life in academia, receiving education from Sydney and Oxford before eventually becoming the founding professor of English at Australian National University, where he became the architect of some of the first curricula for the study of Australian literature, as well as a household name of Australian literature in his own right. 

A giant in his time, Hope occupies a bold and idiosyncratic position in his country’s letters. As Alice has convincingly argued on Poetry Says, The arts culture in Australia has always suffered from an inferiority complex, a neurotic sense that it will never be able to outshine the work of the Northern Anglosphere, nor be able to step out of the shadows of British imperialism, colonial enormities, and its own criminal past. It was in Australia that the sociological phenomenon known as “cultural cringe” was first described by A.A. Phillips, who wrote of the self-loathing that Australians seem to feel about their own artistic culture, observing that Australians have an overwhelming tendency to negatively compare the work of their own countrymen to that of British and Americans, or to dismiss their own artists’ ability to rise to the standards set by Britain and America, even when the talent and potential are clearly present.

Two fascinating responses to this neurosis are relevant for our purposes: the first is that Australia is a country that has tended to embrace modernist and post-modernist trends with fervor in an attempt to distance itself from traditional English values, even going so far as to demolish much of its own beautiful Victorian architecture in favor of more cutting-edge, culturally neutral structures. The second is that Australian poets, because they are not taken seriously by their public, have been conditioned not to take themselves very seriously, and to adopt a pose of irony, diffidence, self-deprecation, and irreverence which over time has become a cultural brand in itself. In America, poets struggle to be taken seriously; in Australia, poets want to make sure you know that they aren’t taking themselves too seriously—putting on such airs could easily lead to mocking dismissal and career suicide. 

Within such a frivolous, modernist atmosphere, A.D. Hope was an iconoclast, an exception that proved the rule. Though he also both playfully and bitterly satirized his own culture—at one point, when asked what poets could do for Australia, Hope replied, “not much, merely justify its existence”— he largely stood in direct contrast to the artists around him. For one thing, his poetry was nothing if not brazenly indebted to the English tradition: once called “the 20th century’s greatest 18th century poet,” Hope wrote metrical, rhymed verse that sometimes recalled the biting wit of Alexander Pope, sometimes the erotic conceits of John Donne, sometimes the mystical swooning of Yeats, sometimes the irony and swagger of Lord Byron, and often all these together in a literary cocktail that could either be delicious or cloying depending on the poem. For another thing, Hope was refreshingly confident in his abilities, and it was his bold and sincere treatments of sexuality, nature, and spirituality, and his harsh dismissal of Australian mediocrity and pretention that made his reputation. Though his inherent unfashionability has made him more and more unfashionable since his death, he remains a thrilling and inspiring example, like Dante or Spenser or Milton or Goethe, of how a single personality of sufficient talent and strength can simultaneously absorb, withstand, and direct the tides of their zeitgeist, and excel on their own terms. 

Despite his once mighty presence in Australia, Hope is very little known in the States, a situation I hope to slightly remedy with today’s poem. I also chose today’s poem because it forms an intriguing contrast with last week’s poem—both treat the subject of the Fall, but in very different ways, and with very different tones. The poem goes like this:

Paradise Saved

Adam, indignant, would not eat with Eve,

They say, and she was driven from his side.

Watching the gates close on her tears, his pride

Upheld him, though he could not help but grieve,

And climbed the wall, because his loneliness

Pined for her lonely figure in the dust:

Lo, there were two! God who is more than just

Sent her a helpmeet in that wilderness.

Day after day he watched them in the waste

Grow old breaking the harsh unfriendly ground,

Bearing their children, till at last they died.

While Adam, whose fellow God had not replaced,

Lived on immortal, young, with virtue crowned,

Sterile and impotent and justified.

On a technical level, there’s little here of note that we haven’t already covered on previous episodes. At this point, you might be able to identify on sight that this is an Italian sonnet, and the octet and sestet are here marked explicitly by a stanza break. To save himself some rhyming challenges in the octet, Hope has substituted the traditional ABBAABBA for the less demanding ABBACDDC, and follows with an easy version of the sestet, EFGEFG, which allows him to use three rhyme sounds rather than the two required by the common EFEFEF pattern. As a matter of fact, if you’re looking to write your first Italian sonnet but find the traditional rhyme scheme overly demanding, I would suggest following exactly the sort of scheme Hope does here—it will allow you to produce a functioning Italian sonnet, and with slightly less handwringing over finding a fitting rhyme. 

Metrically, we’re in a pretty regular iambic pentameter, and there’s only one subtle thing I’d like to draw your attention to, but it’s the subtlety of it that makes it interesting. In both lines 3 and 7, Hope does something that would normally be rhythmically infelicitous, but he manages to pull it off. Namely, he makes a third foot trochaic substitution. This particular move is one I’ve discouraged numerous times off mic. In a previous episode, I’ve remarked that a trochaic substitution in the fifth foot ain’t cute because it brings the momentum of the line to a screeching halt right where the rhythm should receive the most emphasis, but a third foot substitution isn’t far behind in terms of riskiness. By the time you get to the third foot of an iambic line, a momentum has been established for that line, but it’s still fragile. To break it with a trochee right in the middle risks creating a tripping point and tearing the line in half in an inelegant way. Better to put a trochee in the first or second foot, when the rhythm is still formulating, or in the fourth foot, when the established momentum of the line can vault over it and reassert itself in the fifth foot. 

Hope however pulls off his third foot substitutions, and uses the same tactic to do so both times. In both lines three and seven, there is a trochaic substitution in the third foot and in the first foot—a substitution in the first foot, which is almost always kosher, buys the rhythm more time to assert itself, and therefore the third foot substitution doesn’t come off as jarring. In line three, this smoothness is aided by the fact that the third foot trochee is a pretty light one—”close on.” In line seven, it’s aided by the most surefire way to pull off any metrical substitution—put it next to a big caesura. The exclamation point after the second foot effectively restarts the line, making the third foot substitution sound like a first foot substitution. 

Let’s now go back and look at the octet of the poem once again: 

Adam, indignant, would not eat with Eve,

They say, and she was driven from his side.

Watching the gates close on her tears, his pride

Upheld him, though he could not help but grieve,

And climbed the wall, because his loneliness

Pined for her lonely figure in the dust:

Lo, there were two! God who is more than just

Sent her a helpmeet in that wilderness.

Already in the first two lines, Hope makes clear that he is going to be exploring a counter-canonical hypothesis of the Adam and Eve story: what if Adam had refused to be tempted by Eve into eating the fruit of the tree of knowledge? As opposed to Donald Justice, who attempted to examine the original story in a new light, Hope changes the story entirely, yet is ultimately trying to accomplish something similar—namely, to enrich the significance of the original myth, in this case by giving additional depth to Adam’s choice to fall with Eve by speculating upon the consequences that would have ensued had he not done so. 

Also in these first two lines we already get a sense of Hope’s playful disposition, a world away from Justice’s youthful solemnity. He slyly says that Eve was driven from Adam’s side, punning on the fact that Eve was supposedly created from one of Adam’s ribs. 

In line three, Hope gives us an instance of metonymy, a figure of speech in which one thing is indirectly referenced by directly referencing something else associated with that thing. Adam did not watch the gates close on Eve’s tears so much as he watched the gates close on Eve weeping. By substituting “tears” for “Eve weeping,” however, Hope is able to make his narrative more concentrated and elegant while conveying the same amount of information. 

At the mention of “pride” at the end of this line, we already begin to suspect that Adam’s indignation and refusal stems not from pure devotion to God, but from a sinful, unwholesomely selfish impulse, an impulse toward callous self-righteousness. Hope seems to be of the opinion that any man who could allow the woman he loves to suffer a cursed exile alone out of a supposed sense of duty to God must be little better than the ultimate prig. In a stunning inverse parallel, Hope gives us a situation where Eve falls out of pride, and then Adam fails to fall out of pride, and both are punished. Despite his cold indignation, Adam does in fact love Eve, and this love in tandem with his pride is the source of his suffering, a suffering which, as we shall see, ironically eclipses the suffering of the ostensibly more sinful Eve. 

Upon watching his love be banished forever, Adam climbs to the top of the wall we know so well from last week’s poem, and “pined for her lonely figure in the dust.” Here, dust connotes both the aridity and sterility of the world compared to the lush abundance of Eden, and also to the famous condemnation following the expulsion from Eden found in Genesis 3:19: “Dust thou art, and unto dust thou shalt return.” It may also be difficult for the modern reader to hear these lines and not think of Eve in the Eliotic wasteland of modernity, where God has shown her, in Eliot’s words, “fear in a handful of dust.” Beyond the universal moral and theological questions raised by the biblical subject matter, we could interpret this poem as offering us an allegory about the spiritual exile of modernity, and the fate of those who seek to deny or scorn the modern condition through sanctimonious conservatism, and thereby cut themselves off from the plight of their fellow man whom they claim to love. 

We should also note in passing that lines five and six contain an instance of hypallage, a transferred epithet. Hope says that Adam’s “loneliness pined for her lonely figure in the dust.” Of course loneliness itself cannot pine, but Hope trusts us to understand that it is Adam who is pining, and that he has chosen this phrasing for the concentration and parallel music that it provides. 

But Adam’s curse only gets worse from here. Not only must Adam watch as his lover suffers her mortality in the harsh and hostile wilderness, but he must also watch as God, who is “more than just,” gives Eve a new husband, or, in Hope’s diction drawn from Genesis 2:18, a “helpmeet.” 

Saying that God is “more than just” is a rich phrase that I think can be interpreted at least three different ways. Most basically, we can take “more than just” to mean that God is not only just but merciful, and is going above and beyond justice to help Eve better endure the consequences of her actions. Alternatively, we can read this to mean that God’s actions are not “just” at all, but something that transcends justice as we understand it. By giving Eve a new partner, and, as we later find, not doing the same for Adam, God seems to be condoning the very disobedience He is punishing, giving Eve companionship while saddling Adam not only with loneliness and heartache but obsessive jealousy. God’s justice is clearly not what He claims it to be. Furthermore, the fact that God would give a new partner to Eve rather than Adam is telling of God’s long-term intentions: God wishes the propagation of the human race to occur in the wilderness rather than in Eden. As in Justice’s poem, it is revealed that God’s plan was for humankind to leave the garden all along. Finally, we can read the phrase “God, who is more than just” as a typical instance of Hope’s sardonic tone, a tongue-in-cheek mockery of the idea that any God who could condemn all of humankind to suffering and death for one woman’s eating of a fruit is at all just, and that even the provision of a new husband is cold comfort for the severity of the punishment. 

Let’s now go back and read the poem again, this time all the way through:

Adam, indignant, would not eat with Eve,

They say, and she was driven from his side.

Watching the gates close on her tears, his pride

Upheld him, though he could not help but grieve,

And climbed the wall, because his loneliness

Pined for her lonely figure in the dust:

Lo, there were two! God who is more than just

Sent her a helpmeet in that wilderness.

Day after day he watched them in the waste

Grow old breaking the harsh unfriendly ground,

Bearing their children, till at last they died.

While Adam, whose fellow God had not replaced,

Lived on immortal, young, with virtue crowned,

Sterile and impotent and justified.

In the sestet, we learn that Adam’s paradise, which he sacrificed his soul mate for, is anything but. Lonely and bereft, he grows obsessed with the progress of Eve’s family “in the waste,” which again recalls Eliot’s Wasteland, and lives vicariously through them and their travails while ignoring the garden’s blessings he treasured so much in the first place. 

Adams watches them for their entire lifetimes, and, presumably, he would never cease to watch the progress and suffering of mankind. Even if humanity were to destroy itself through nuclear holocaust, disease, A.I., or environmental destruction, Adam would still be there, nursing his prideful solitude. In the final analysis, we realize that Adam has indeed, in Milton’s words, “created a hell of heaven.” Eden has become a precise analogue for hell— Adam suffers there eternally, subject to crushing solitude, guilt, and psychological torment, but he cannot escape because his pride, like Satan’s, holds him in place. Like Satan, his unquenchable pride is dependent on the fact that he feels that his actions are justified, and therefore he remains blind to the actual nature of reality and God’s intentions. 

The last two lines conclude with Hope’s characteristic bite. With withering sarcasm, Hope describes Adam as “immortal, young, and virtue-crowned,” and concludes by stating that he is “sterile, impotent, and justified.” Despite the teeming life of the garden, Adam is sterile, while Eve and her husband out in the arid wasteland are fertile. Companionless, Adam cannot fulfill the imperative of his creaturehood to propagate. As a living thing, he has become a mockery, an aberration, a curiosity. He is furthermore imaginatively sterile, unable to conceive of a morality beyond the one God has dogmatically handed to him. His description as “impotent” further emphasizes his lack of a mate, and points out the curse of being trapped in the garden without the benefit of the liberating fruit—he is powerless to do anything but stare out at the world, incapable of exercising his free will in any meaningful way. What free will he has is furthermore crippled by his pride, which, as we observed earlier, will not permit him to liberate himself from his hellish conditions. 

In true 18th century style, Hope’s poem comes with a clear moral: It is far better to be mortal with love than immortal without love, more righteous to stay by the side of those who sin and be their helpmate than abandon them and pompously condemn them from on high. Similar to Justice’s poem, Hope seems to argue that the Fall was a net good, a chance for us to learn, through tribulation and death, what it means to be loving and compassionate with one another. I’m reminded of the differing goals of Theravada and Mahayana Buddhism: In Theravada, the goal is to become what is called an arhat, an individual so detached from the world and worldly desire that they can personally escape from the cycle of rebirth, and attain nirvana. In Mahayana Buddhism, the goal is instead to become a bodhisattva, someone who almost reaches the point of nirvana, but turns back in order to help others reach that same state—one’s own salvation is only desirable once everyone is able to attain salvation. Here, Hope is urging us to be more like bodhisattvas than arhats— people who recognize that the true morality is one that does not conflate sinner and sin, but embraces one to dispel the other, and that paradise is only saved when we are able to get there together. 

            With all that we’ve learned and explored, let’s read through this poem one last time, as an old friend:

Paradise Saved

Adam, indignant, would not eat with Eve,

They say, and she was driven from his side.

Watching the gates close on her tears, his pride

Upheld him, though he could not help but grieve,

And climbed the wall, because his loneliness

Pined for her lonely figure in the dust:

Lo, there were two! God who is more than just

Sent her a helpmeet in that wilderness.

Day after day he watched them in the waste

Grow old breaking the harsh unfriendly ground,

Bearing their children, till at last they died.

While Adam, whose fellow God had not replaced,

Lived on immortal, young, with virtue crowned,

Sterile and impotent and justified.