Today’s Poem: Eldorado

Edgar Allan Poe and the ballad’s fruitless quest

Randolph Caldicott, Drawing of a Knight on Horseback, 1892 (Wikimedia Commons)

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Eldorado

by 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 ground
That 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!’
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Explorers viewing some part of the Americas for the first time, from the rail of a ship, would have perceived a shoreline marking the beginning of mystery. If America seemed mythic to them, its imagined mythos was located both in the context of the myths and tales they brought with them and in the very why-not aspect of its newness to 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 or the fabled Eldorado, a city made of gold. They never found what they were looking for. But the imaginative vision of it drove them forward: down and back up the length of Florida, through the dense southern forests to the Mississippi River, and eventually — ascending a peak in modern-day Panama — to a view of the Pacific.

Edgar Allan Poe (1809–1849), whose January 19 birthday we anticipate today, inherited from those explorers both the continent they discovered and the myths and tales they brought with them, then left behind. For Poe, English ballad meter, as well as the ghosts of old stories, was another kind of haunting, though he continually renovated its patterns it in his own verse.

Edgar Allan Poe, June 1849 (Wikimedia Commons)

Longtime readers will remember “Annabel Lee,” one of our first offerings, appearing here last January 31, as the kind of inexorable poetic earworm at which Poe excelled, as well as a recasting of the traditional English ballad, in both its subject and its form. Today’s Poem is another revival and reworking of an old narrative trope, as well as a reworking of the ballad form as a medium for narrative. Where “Annabel Lee” draws on the murder-ballad tradition, “Eldorado” picks up the trail of a mythic quest: the Spanish story of the golden city, transplanted to the new continent.

The poem’s relentless dimeter lines, first and second and fourth and fifth in each sestet, break up the expected tetrameter of the ballad stanza. The third and sixth lines resolve into trimeter, as the second and fourth lines of a ballad stanza would ordinarily do. This structure both enables and emphasizes the insistent close-set rhymes.

In the generally flexible ballad tradition, the tetrameter third line sometimes features internal rhyme as part of the stanzaic pattern. Here, rhymes that would otherwise be internal to each tetrameter line are, by the breaking in half of those traditional lines, turned outward and largely end-stopped either with commas or with em-dashes.

These rhymes, close-set and emphatic as they are, become both hypnotic and relentless. The poem both describes and enacts the gold-spell under which its “gallant knight” labors in such futility. It mesmerizes, but it also frustrates — the exhortation of “pilgrim shadow” to keep riding is hardly a resolution. It simply stokes, fruitlessly, the same obsessiveness that animates such short stories by Poe as “The Black Cat” or “The Tell-Tale Heart.” “Eldorado,”with its own urgent pulsebeat, is a ballad that rides forward but, like its knight, never arrives.

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