Poem of the Day: ‘Eldorado’

Though it’s easy to feel, on a daily basis, that we live in the weary shadow of some end-time or other, ours is a still-young country. We don’t have much to speak of in the way of a mythology: nothing on the order of, say, the Knights of the Round Table and the search for the Holy Grail, nothing really in the quest-trope line.Then again, maybe this is a matter of perspective. To explorers who came to this continent, when, viewed from a ship, it was nothing but a shoreline marking the beginning of mystery, America surely seemed mythic enough. But then, they came from old countries and brought their myths with them. Only in a place utterly unknown might they hope to find that the old tales were true: the literal existence of a Fountain of Youth, a city made of gold.In the ear of Edgar Allan Poe (1809–1849), three centuries after those Spanish explorers, the old ballad meter was a continual haunting, though he renovated its patterns it in his own verse. Sun readers will remember “Annabel Lee,” which ran as the Poem of the Day last September, as the kind of inexorable poetic earworm at which Poe excelled. Today’s Poem of the Day, “Eldorado,” is another. Where “Annabel Lee” recounts a kind of displaced Scots-flavored legend, “Eldorado,” picks up the trail of a mythic quest: the old story transplanted to the new continent. In relentless dimeter lines, relieved at intervals by trimeter, and with equally insistent close-set rhymes, “Eldorado” is a ballad that rides forward, like its knight, through its four sestets: rides forward, but never arrives.Eldoradoby Edgar Allan Poe Gaily bedight, A gallant knight,In sunshine and in shadow, Had journeyed long, Singing a song,In search of Eldorado. But he grew old — This knight so bold — And o’er his heart a shadow — Fell as he found No spot of groundThat looked like Eldorado. And, as his strength Failed him at length,He met a pilgrim shadow — ‘Shadow,’ said he, ‘Where can it be —This land of Eldorado?’ ‘Over the Mountains Of the Moon,Down the Valley of the Shadow, Ride, boldly ride,’ The shade replied, —‘If you seek for Eldorado!’___________________________________________With “Poem of the Day,” The New York Sun offers a daily portion of verse selected by Joseph Bottum with the help of the North Carolina poet Sally Thomas, the Sun’s associate poetry editor. Tied to the day, or the season, or just individual taste, the poems are drawn from the deep traditions of English verse: the great work of the past and the living poets who keep those traditions alive. The goal is always to show that poetry can still serve as a delight to the ear, an instruction to the mind, and a tonic for the soul.

Poem of the Day: ‘Eldorado’

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