Incarnate Devil
Incarnate Devil - meaning Summary
Eden Reshaped by Myth
The poem reimagines Eden and origin myths as ambiguous, living forces where good and evil are intertwined. Thomas uses the serpent and garden imagery to suggest creation was both playful and dangerous, a time when divine figures “played” with pardon and sin took shape. The speaker recalls a mythic past in which sacred and profane coexist, portraying cosmic beginnings as simultaneously beautiful, mysterious, and unsettling.
Read Complete AnalysesIncarnate devil in a talking snake, The central plains of Asia in his garden, In shaping-time the circle stung awake, In shapes of sin forked out the bearded apple, And God walked there who was a fiddling warden And played down pardon from the heavens' hill. When we were strangers to the guided seas, A handmade moon half holy in a cloud, The wisemen tell me that the garden gods Twined good and evil on an eastern tree; And when the moon rose windily it was Black as the beast and paler than the cross. We in our Eden knew the secret guardian In sacred waters that no frost could harden, And in the mighty mornings of the earth; Hell in a horn of sulphur and the cloven myth, All heaven in the midnight of the sun, A serpent fiddled in the shaping-time.
Feel free to be first to leave comment.