Imperial Adam
Imperial Adam
Original Text
A.D. Hope, Collected Poems: 1930-1970 (Sydney: Angus and Robertson, 1972): 83-84. PR 6015.O55 A17 1972 Robarts Library
1Imperial Adam, naked in the dew,
2Felt his brown flanks and found the rib was gone.
3Puzzled he turned and saw where, two and two,
4The mighty spoor of Jahweh marked the lawn.
5Then he remembered through mysterious sleep
6The surgeon fingers probing at the bone,
7The voice so far away, so rich and deep:
8"It is not good for him to live alone."
9Turning once more he found Man's counterpart
10In tender parody breathing at his side.
11He knew her at first sight, he knew by heart
12Her allegory of sense unsatisfied.
13The pawpaw drooped its golden breasts above
14Less generous than the honey of her flesh;
15The innocent sunlight showed the place of love;
16The dew on its dark hairs winked crisp and fresh.
17This plump gourd severed from his virile root,
18She promised on the turf of Paradise
19Delicious pulp of the forbidden fruit;
20Sly as the snake she loosed her sinuous thighs,
21And waking, smiled up at him from the grass;
22Her breasts rose softly and he heard her sigh--
23From all the beasts whose pleasant task it was
24In Eden to increase and multiply
25Adam had learned the jolly deed of kind:
26He took her in his arms and there and then,
27Like the clean bests, embracing from behind,
28Began in joy to found the breed of men.
29Then from the spurt of seed within her broke
30Her terrible and triumphant female cry,
31Split upward by the sexual lightning stroke.
32It was the beasts now who stood watching by:
33The gravid elephant, the calving hind,
34The breeding bitch, the she-ape big with young
35Were the first gentle midwives of mankind;
36The teeming lioness rasped her with her tongue;
37The proud vicuña nuzzled her as she slept
38Lax on the grass; and Adam watching too
39Saw how her dumb breasts at their ripening wept,
40The great pod of her belly swelled and grew,
41And saw its water break, and saw, in fear,
42Its quaking muscles in the act of birth,
43Between her legs a pigmy face appear,
44And the first murderer lay upon the earth.
Publication Start Year
1952
RPO poem Editors
Ian Lancashire
RPO Edition
2009
Rhyme
Form