When A.D. Hope published his first collection of poetry, The Wandering Islands, at the age of 48, he was already regarded as the leading Australian poet of his day. The book’s belated publication in 1955 was due in large part to Australia’s prudish censorship laws, and there was much in The Wandering Islands to rankle the censors. Hope’s poetry was often explicit in its sexual details, but this candidness was matched by a mastery of form and authority of diction that verged on the virtuosic and the pompous respectively. As Clive James writes “[Hope] spoke from on high. His vocabulary was of the present, but it had the past in it, transparent a long way down. And it was all sent forward like a wave by his magisterial sense of rhythm.”
Hope’s strict adherence to formal verse and his oracular voice can at times inhibit the erotic he audaciously explores, so that restraint (a crucial element of seduction) can calcify into incapacity, as if both partners have handcuffed themselves to the bed, beyond each other’s reach. Hope’s is also a singularly mascuiline eroticism.
“Imperial Adam” is Hope’s most anthologized erotic poem, and his best. Rejected by the publishers of Australian Poetry in 1954 because the editors feared it bordered on “intellectualized pornography”, the poem reimagines paradise and our species’s first sexual act.
It is interesting to compare the poem to the canonical narratives on the fall of man. “Imperial Adam” does away with the parables of Genesis and the angels and theology of Milton’s Paradise Lost to focus exclusively on the carnal. There is no serpent to tempt Adam, but Eve’s body, in particular, her pubic hairs: “The innocent sunlight showed the place of love; / The dew on its dark hairs winked crisp and fresh.” The other inhabitants of paradise watch on in awe as Adam and Eve have sex. Upon reaching her climax, Eve lets out a “terrible and triumphant female cry”. There is something to this act that the beasts recognise as new: it is more than sex for procreation, it is sex for pleasure, driven by desire, and brings with it a whole new world of possibilities: ecstasy, gratification, jealousy, envy, shame, and most devestatingly, precipitates man’s fall away from god. The fall is not sealed by Adam and Eve’s expulsion from Eden, but rather by Eve giving birth to Cain, his “pygmy face” arriving to a fearful audience. The poem’s shocking final line “And the first murderer lay upon the earth” links sex from its origins with violence and death, to make it antithetical with innocence and complicate god’s first instruction to man: be fruitful and multiply.
Imperial Adam
Imperial Adam, naked in the dew,
Felt his brown flanks and found the rib was gone.
Puzzled he turned and saw where, two and two,
The mighty spoor of Yahweh marked the lawn.
Then he remembered through mysterious sleep
The surgeon fingers probing at the bone,
The voice so far away, so rich and deep:
“It is not good for him to live alone.”
Turning once more he found Man’s counterpart
In tender parody breathing at his side.
He knew her at first sight, he knew by heart
Her allegory of sense unsatisfied.
The pawpaw drooped its golden breasts above
Less generous than the honey of her flesh;
The innocent sunlight showed the place of love;
The dew on its dark hairs winked crisp and fresh.
This plump gourd severed from his virile root,
She promised on the turf of Paradise
Delicious pulp of the forbidden fruit;
Sly as the snake she loosed her sinuous thighs,
And waking, smiled up at him from the grass;
Her breasts rose softly and he heard her sigh —
From all the beasts whose pleasant task it was
In Eden to increase and multiply
Adam had learned the jolly deed of kind:
He took her in his arms and there and then,
Like the clean beasts, embracing from behind,
Began in joy to found the breed of men.
Then from the spurt of seed within her broke
Her terrible and triumphant female cry,
Split upward by the sexual lightning stroke.
It was the beasts now who stood watching by:
The gravid elephant, the calving hind,
The breeding bitch, the she-ape big with young
Were the first gentle midwives of mankind;
The teeming lioness rasped her with her tongue;
The proud vicuna nuzzled her as she slept
Lax on the grass; and Adam watching too
Saw how her dumb breasts at their ripening wept,
The great pod of her belly swelled and grew,
And saw its water break, and saw, in fear,
It squaking muscles in the act of birth,
Between her legs a pigmy face appear,
And the first murderer lay upon the earth.
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Author: Thomas Moody
