First Blood - Critical Essay

Literary Review, Fall, 2000 by Jean Hollander

   After the fall when snake
   and Adam slunk away
   from satin-sheeted love
   and Eve uncoiled and stretched
   and knew the dawn

   when lion cubs lay curled around the lamb
   although their legs stirred
   to a leap in dreams,
   the falcon's eyes still hooded
   and the vulture's breath still sweet

   then in that silent light
   while birds were huddled into sleep,
   then, like a signal, a new need
   for blood, the whine of a mosquito
   hovered over Eve, surprised

   her smooth white arm and bit,
   raised a strange welt
   her sullen fingers scratched,
   a touch of the first blood--
   a bond of motherhood

   an itch for knowledge

JEAN HOLLANDER

Writing "First Blood"

First Blood" was the first poem I wrote while staying at an international writer's colony in Switzerland last summer. Having arrived with certain hesitations--this was my first stay at a writer's colony--I was delighted to find the chateau as beautiful as it had looked in the photo. The garden, with tables arranged for privacy, looked inviting enough to make the muses want to linger. There were views of Lake Geneva with Mont Blanc hovering in the distance. The living arrangements were comfortable, the food tasty and plentiful, and the people interesting. A veritable paradise! But as we lingered over wine and conversation after dinner, our pleasant talk was interrupted--mosquitoes had invaded our paradise.

Mind you, these were not the vicious, voracious kind I had become accustomed to in New Jersey, who announce their invasion with a high-pitched whine before attacking, and leave hard welts that itch for days. These were genteel mosquitoes, thin and fragile, who barely pricked the skin and raised the gentlest welt that disappeared almost at once. Inspired by their delicate intrusion into my vision of paradise, I began to write the poem.

In Genesis, the fall has immediate consequence. Adam and Eve suddenly "know" that they are naked, and try to hide their newly discovered shame with fig leaves, and themselves from God. The scene ends with their wrangling about whom to blame: Adam blames Eve, she puts it on the serpent, and God, of course, blames them all with his curse. Their lives and the lives of the animals around them are forever changed, even before the expulsion. In covering their now painful nakedness with the skins of animals, God becomes the first furrier, setting a bad example for us all.

Since the Biblical story is so terse and provocative, exegetes, philosophers, and poets have endlessly revisited and recreated the scene in their effort to understand it. Some have proclaimed pre-fall Adam and Eve innocent of sex, despite the injunction to increase and multiply, which in one version of the text occurs before the fall. Others, Milton among them, saw the innocent beauty of sexual union become corrupted and shameful only after they surrendered to temptation. But most have seen the fall as just that, a sudden fall from grace. After Eve has eaten the forbidden fruit, Adam greets Eve with "How art thou lost, how on a sudden lost ..." as the garland he has woven for her drops from his "slack hand ... and all the faded roses shed."

My version of the fall, inspired by the gentle Lavigny mosquitoes, is a slower descent into the flawed realities of the world. In my poem the curse has not yet begun to be felt by all, although the depravity of the new-found passion between Adam and Eve is shown in the phrase "satin-sheeted love," their guilt in Adam's slinking away. Eve's link to the snake is hinted at in her "uncoiling." Yet true to the medieval view of woman as seducer and sensualist, Eve seems to have had a pleasant night of it. There is an old Latin saying that after coitus "all creatures are sad, except women and roosters."

The fall and subsequent curse, which I see as occurring in the evening "cool of the day" when the Lord God walks in the garden, is slowly setting in. The night, when all things rest, has slowed the inevitable progress into degradation. Evil is held at bay in the inertia of custom--the animals still sleep together as they do in those wonderful paintings of the earthly paradise--the effects of the fall delayed into the next day. The idea of "prey" did not exist in the original creation. The Garden of Eden was vegetarian. Fruit on the trees was created "for meat" to man, and "to every beast of the earth, and to every fowl of the air, and to everything that creepeth upon the earth wherein there is life, I have given every green herb for meat." It seems to me that such an arrangement could not suddenly, in one moment, be destroyed. The desire for prey--to kill and eat--that appetite had to develop slowly, engendered by mists of the night and the hungers of sleep. Also, having been newly created, all animals are young and playful. A lion "cub" would perhaps not attack a lamb. In a land where there is no death, the vulture could not yet have soiled its breath with carrion.

With the lines "a touch of the first blood--/ a bond of motherhood" I joined those who believe in a pregenerative Eden. Eve did not menstruate, nor did insects carry eggs to ensure the survival of their species before the fall. Only with the introduction of death did birth become a necessity. The reason only the female mosquito bites is that she needs to feed her eggs with the blood she sucks from us.