The juice from magical fruit

Very early this morning, I woke up with the stanza "Garden" in my mind and accordingly got up and posted it before returning to bed. (Otherwise, I would likely have forgotten some of it.) Here it is again:

The juice of Eden's bitter tree

Was in the cup from which he shrank,

And like our father Adam, he

Was doomed to die the day he drank.

Enacting there the Fall afresh,

He knew according to the flesh

    Our woe, and in obedience

    He did what Adam did in sin,

    That full atonement thus might thence begin.

Around noon, I read this in Robert Douglas-Fairhurst's biography of Lewis Carroll:

Carroll explored similar themes in his poem 'Stolen Waters', which he finished on 9 May 1862 . . . . It begins with a curious mixture of Keats's 'La Belle Dame Sans Merci' and Christina Rossetti's 'Goblin Market', a poem Carroll finished reading that month, as the speaker, 'Sir Knight', tastes the juice from magical fruit offered to him by an apparently beautiful woman; only after kissing her does he realize that she is a had with a face that is 'withered, old, and gray'. What restores him to happiness is hearing a song about an 'angel-child' . . . who sits in a garden . . . . The surface meaning is that the speaker, having been seduced by adult experience, now realizes that he lives in a world of corruption . . . .

My stanza speaks of Jesus, in the Garden, drinking the juice of the Tree of Knowledge and thereby experiencing for himself Adam's fall from Paradise into the Lone and Dreary World. Carroll's knight likewise drinks "the juice from magical fruit" and thereby experiences the "world of corruption."

The reference to Christina Rossetti's Goblin Market is also interesting, as that poem was in the syncs a couple of years ago. I first posted about it on May 16, 2024, in "'Come buy,' call the goblins," where I mention having read the poem for the first time "a few days ago," bringing us very close to the May 9 date mentioned by Douglas-Fairhurst.