Eldorado

For this blog, I felt it would be as good a time as any to talk about a poem, so for that I decided to go back to a familiar name that I’ve already looked at a couple times in older posts: Edgar Allan Poe. To delve into the fascinating world of Poe, I chose Eldorado, one of his last writings and published only months before his death in 1849. It is a fitting poem written by a man nearing the inevitable end of life’s journey to be about someone to be also on a quest toward a greater goal. The poem opens up in a manner somewhat outside of Poe’s norm, as it seems to evoke thoughts of medieval tales of King Arthur’s court or “Sir Gawain and the Green Knight”, saying, A gallant knight, In sunshine and in shadow, Had journeyed long, Singing a song, In search of Eldorado”. While it is only natural to imagine a shining knight traversing along dangerous pathways to discover the hidden treasures of the long lost city of gold, there is in fact another story being told here, revealed in the end. Each and every person, like the brave knight, ceaselessly traverses through “sunshine and shadow”, through times of joy and times of grief, in order to seek out that which they desire most, something that is different for every person. Poe also identifies a harsh reality toward each person’s internal strive toward their treasure, that many times it is never found. The knight in the poem, “grew old-This knight so bold-And o'er his heart a shadow Fell as he found No spot of round That looked like Eldorado”. Poe’s description of the knight who has spent his entire life scourging for the riches of the earth may seem foolish and rather silly to the modern reader, who scoff at the idea of someone devoting their entire life to the slim chance of discovering physical and ephemeral greatness. But as much many refuse to believe, people have not changed all that much over time, as we what drove men and women to pursue ideas and goals are relatively the same today. The greatest of these is greed, the desire to own much more than is necessary. One does not need to think very hard to determine that greed still drives people, cities, and countries toward greatness, and naturally, toward their own destruction. People never stop dreaming about all that they wish they could acquire over the course of their lifetime, burdened with the task of filling the void within their own hearts with the material desires of this world. Such is where the knight is as well when the shadow falls upon him, and he asks where to find Eldorado. In reply, the shadow says, “"Over the Mountains Of the Moon, Down the Valley of the Shadow, Ride, boldly ride, "The shade replied-"If you seek for Eldorado!"” As the shadow bellows out his spur of knowledge to the aged knight, one would think that this would give the seeker a sense of closure in knowing that even though his journey must go on, he will eventually find Eldorado. But this is not the case. Instead there is an implied feeling that there is no Eldorado, that the physical treasures that the knight pursued and sought out over the course of his entire life in the fragmented hope of finding gold, have all been for nothing. The treasures of this world blinded the knight to what true treasure really is, which is that which transcends beyond the physical world and into the intellectual and even spiritual. The true treasures to be find could be anything from knowledge, wisdom, and understanding to religion or God, all of which are true treasures that can never be measured by physical means, but instead are measured by how it is that they can transform our lives in a way that money never could and never will.