Adam's Dream

Adam's Dream

1. Direct Biblical Allusion

   • Dreams
     • In Genesis God comes to Abimelech, Jacob and Joseph (called 'this dreamer' by his brothers, Gen 37:19)) to name a few.
       • This is contrasted with the direct communication between man and God in the Garden - the anthropomorphised God of Genesis 2-3. Now, there are barriers to affect this communication, and we struggle.
     • Now, we wake, whereas before all was an 'age long daydream'.
   • 'Be fruitful and multiply' Gen 1:22
     • Still there were more of them, the plain was filling As by an alien arithmetical magic Unknown in Eden a mechanical Addition without meaning, joining only Number to number in no mode or order, Weaving no pattern.

2. Paradise Lost

   • Chance governs all. Into this wild abyss, The womb of nature, and perhaps her grave, Of neither seas , nor shore, nor air, nor fire, But all these in their pregnant causes mixed Confusedly, and which must ever fight, Unless the Almighty maker them ordain His dark materials to create more worlds, Into this wild abyss the wary fiend looked a while, Pondering his voyage, for no narrow firth he had to cross.
     • where eldest night and Chaos, ancestors of nature, hold eternal anarchy, amidst the noise of endless wars, and by confusion stand.
       • The troops of the elements 'Swarm populous, numbered as the sands/ of Barca, or Cyrene's torrid soil.
   • For the creatures moved Towards no fixed mark even when in growing bands They clashed against each other and clashing fell In mounds of bodies. For they rose again, Identical or interchangeable, and went their way that was not like a way

3. Predestination

   • I believe that the source of the obsession arose in Orkney itself and was in some way related to the influence of Scottish Calvinism with its emphasis on original sin and predestination. McCullogh
   • They were about some business strange to him That had a form and sequence past their knowledge; And that was why they ran so frenziedly. Yet all, it seemed, made up a story, illustrated By these living, the unknowning, cast Each singly for his part. But Adam longed For more, not this mere moving pattern, not This illustrated storybook of mankind Always-a-making, improving on nothing.

4. Eve - Love as Comfort

   • Cried Out and was at peace, and turned again In love and grief in Eve's encircling arms
     • Eve is both comfort and reason for the fall.
   • And Earth's last wonder Eve (the first great dream Which is the ground of every dream since then)
     • Suggests Genesis 2 version of events, wherein Eve is created last.
   • Fallen in Eve's fallen arms, his terror drowned In her engulfing terror, in the abyss Whence there's no further to fall, and comfort is --

5. Desert//Plenty

   • After his age long daydream in the Garden When heaven and sun woke his wakening mind The earth with all its hills and woods and water, The friendly tribes of trees and animals.
   • That he was standing on a rocky ledge High on the mountainside, bare crag behind, In front a plain as far as eye could reach,'