The Imperfect Paradise by Linda Pastan
"The Imperfect Paradise" by Linda Pastan is a sequence of six Shakespearean sonnets that delve into the themes surrounding the biblical story of Adam and Eve and the concept of the Fall of Man. Each sonnet explores different facets of the Eden narrative, beginning with the contrasting perspectives on beauty and nature, as seen in the first sonnet, "Seasonal," where the speaker grapples with her pessimism against an optimistic view presented by a figure addressed as "My Adam." The poems pose contemplative questions about existence, choice, and the fragility of beauty, such as distinguishing flowers from weeds and the implications of human creation. Throughout the sequence, Pastan employs rich imagery and metaphors that reflect on the complexities of human emotions and relationships, likening them to elements of nature. The final sonnet, "Somewhere in the Euphrates," juxtaposes modern inquiries into the Eden story with the idea that even if the literal existence of Eden is debated, its significance in shaping humanity remains profound. Pastan’s unusual use of the sonnet form in her typically free verse style lends a structured depth to her meditations on these timeless themes, ultimately inviting readers to reflect on the bittersweet intertwining of love, grief, and the human experience.
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Subject Terms
The Imperfect Paradise by Linda Pastan
First published: 1988, in The Imperfect Paradise
Type of poem: Sonnet sequence
The Poem
“The Imperfect Paradise” is a sequence of six Shakespearean sonnets meditating on aspects of the story of Adam and Eve and the Fall of Man. The sonnets, in order, are titled “Seasonal,” “In the Garden,” “Deep in These Woods,” “Thief,” “The Imperfect Paradise,” and “Somewhere in the Euphrates.”
“Seasonal” presents a contrast between the pessimistic perspective of the speaker and the more optimistic perspective of a second person, whom the speaker addresses as “you,” perhaps the speaker’s husband: “you” is also referred to as “My Adam.” The speaker asks this second person which season he considers the loveliest. He unhesitatingly chooses spring, while the speaker chooses winter, and the rest of the sonnet contrasts these perspectives and examines the evidence that each perspective considers decisive.
“In the Garden” opens with the question, “How do we tell the flowers from the weeds” and extends this botanical discrimination to how one chooses among people, such as Jacob—the chosen brother in Genesis 25-27—and Esau. The sonnet ends by noting how roses are dying while “dandelions and chokeweed multiply,” implying that the good and the beautiful is more fragile and ephemeral, while the base increases.
“Deep in These Woods” depicts a somewhat ambiguous dialogue between the speaker and a gardener. The speaker questions how a garden can be made to grow deep within the woods, and supposes that the gardener is concealing an axe and must be cutting down oaks in order to create room and light for the garden to grow. The speaker wonders if Adam also hid certain things from Eve.
“Thief” imagines a thieving squirrel, caught in the garden, who is removed five miles away, but then returns to where it was originally trapped. The squirrel is then compared to people’s fluctuating states of mind: doubts and alternating boredom and passion, which appear to be as uncontrollable as the thieving squirrel.
“The Imperfect Paradise” asks what would have happened if God had stopped creating after the fifth day, before humans were created. The speaker wonders if the wind could have adequately supplied the sound of lamentation and asks if God would have been satisfied or would have hungered for a “human crowd.” The speaker contrasts the “green hosannas of a budding leaf” with “the strict contract between love and grief.” The unthinking praise implied by the beauty of the natural world is thus contrasted with the bittersweet result of creating human life.
“Somewhere in the Euphrates,” the final sonnet in the sequence, contrasts two ways in which the modern person might relate to the Eden stories. In the first eight lines the poet speaks of “the rusted gates of Eden” still existing, buried somewhere in the Euphrates River. She imagines archaeologists “at awful cost” trying to find “a snakeskin or an apple stain,” searching out of the need to either prove the existence of these ancient legends or disprove and discard them. The poet calls such seekers “fools of science,” who must either have something literally in hand or not believe in it. On the other hand, the poet sees a value in “Geographies of what we only feel,” implying that legendary or not, the Eden story helps make humans what they are and is to that extent “true” and valuable. In the last six lines the poet looks outside at a gardener, on his knees planting flowers. This, she says, is as close as the gardener comes to prayer, and in a final line she conceives his actions as “Digging up Eden with a single hoe.”
Forms and Devices
Almost all of Linda Pastan’s published poetry is free verse, so this sonnet sequence is quite unusual for her. As Shakespearean or English sonnets, each of the six poems that make up “The Imperfect Paradise” is composed of fourteen pentameter lines, arranged in a rhyme scheme of ababcdcdefefgg. In the tradition of the sonnet sequence, much like Sir Philip Sidney’s Astrophel and Stella (1591), Edmund Spenser’s Amoretti (1595), or Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s Sonnets from the Portuguese (1850), each of Pastan’s sonnets is tied to a central theme, in this case the Eden story.
Pastan furthers the allusion to Eden, in four of the sonnets, by conceiving a dialogue between the speaker and another character who is a sort of Adam in the garden to Pastan’s Eve. Indeed, Pastan’s husband Ira was a gardener, and the poems, while clearly works of art, have some biographical resonance.
The first five sonnets are each formed around a question: Which is the loveliest season? How does one tell the flowers from the weeds? How does a garden grow in the middle of a deep and dark woods? Is the thieving squirrel like human moods? What if humans had not been created? In that sense the sonnets are meditations, speculations about basic questions raised by the story of Eden and the Fall, Adam and Eve’s sin and humanity’s banishment from the garden. The speaker does not give direct answers to these questions. Rather, she ends each sonnet with a somewhat ambiguous but richly suggestive image. A look at the first sonnet will illustrate this.
“Seasonal” asks the question, “Which season is the loveliest of all?” At first this seems to be an innocent and easy question, similar to whether one prefers chocolate or vanilla ice cream. However, from the answers given to the question, one can see that the issue at stake is no less than the essential nature of the world, and which season best represents this nature. “My Adam,” the person being spoken to, finds the world “a warm and charming place,” and his choice of spring as the loveliest season matches his basic optimism. The speaker, in contrast, finds the world “a garden of conspicuous waste” and thinks the “chaos of the snow” better represents this world.
The final image, in lines 13-14, illustrates a sort of synthesis but also a remaining tension between these perspectives: “Still, at your touch my house warms to the eaves/ As autumn torches all the fragile leaves.” The use of the word “still” suggests that the speaker is being convinced by the warmth of “Adam’s” touch that the world may be a good place after all; yet when this touch is compared, in the next line, to the torch autumn applies to the leaves, the speaker seems to be confirming her original idea even more strongly than at first. The apparent beauty of this world, it would seem, serves only to confirm and make more poignant an even deeper meaninglessness. The alliteration between “touches” and “torches” adds beauty and force to this conclusion.
Sources for Further Study
The Georgia Review. XLII, Summer, 1988, p. 407.
Library Journal. CXIII, May 15, 1988, p. 85.
The New York Times Book Review. XCIII, September 18, 1988, p. 42.