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The Beauty of Adam and Eve

Decent Essays

In a world bombarded with technology and constant distractions, society often forgets the importance and beauty of art. A branch of art, literature, lends a tremendous impact upon society. Marjorie Pickthall constructs an elegant poem, Adam and Eve, while reinterpreting the well-known Biblical story, Adam and Eve. Similar to Pickthall, a renaissance artist, Masaccio, however, interprets the Biblical story of Adam and Eve with a different interpretation. In his painting, the expulsion of Eden, he focuses on Adam and Eve’s reaction while leaving the Garden of Eden. Although Pickthal and Masaccio have different prescripts of the story of Adam and Eve, both adopt the same plot. While arriving in the perfect garden of Eden, Eve is suddenly attracted to the forbidden fruit. ‘Beguiled by the serpent’, Eve eats the fruit, passing it on to her husband, and is then banished, along with Adam, from the Garden of Eden. Because Pickthall uses artistic license and a rhyme scheme, she constructs a poem, indirectly relating to Masaccio's painting, the expulsion of Eden, and directly relating to the bible.
Due to Pickthall’s usage of artistic license in her poem,a new meaning arises in relation to the Bible. The major instance of artistic license in Adam and Eve, the location in which the whole story takes place in, The Garden of Eden, changes to “Beauty”. The first stanza describes, gracefully, Eve’s first interaction with the tree of knowledge, “In the clear silence Beauty found them

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