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.