Hans Christian Andersen

The Phoenix Bird
 

In the Garden of Paradise,
beneath the Tree of Knowledge,
bloomed a rose bush.
Here, in the first rose, a bird was born.
His flight was like the flashing of light,
his plumage was beauteous,
and his song ravishing.

But when Eve plucked the fruit of the tree
of knowledge of good and evil,
when she and Adam
were driven from Paradise,
there fell from the flaming sword of the cherub
a spark into the nest of the bird,
which blazed up forthwith.

The bird perished in the flames;
but from the red egg in the nest
there fluttered aloft a new one
the one solitary Phoenix bird.
The fable tells that he dwells in Arabia,
and that every hundred years,
he burns himself to death in his nest;

But each time a new Phoenix,
the only one in the world,
rises up from the red egg.
The bird flutters round us,
swift as light,
beauteous in color,
charming in song.

When a mother sits by her infant's cradle,
he stands on the pillow,
and, with his wings,
forms a glory around the infant's head.
He flies through the chamber of content,
and brings sunshine into it,
and the violets on the humble table
smell doubly sweet.

But the Phoenix is not the bird of
Arabia alone.
He wings his way in the glimmer
of the Northern Lights
over the plains of Lapland,
and hops among the yellow flowers
in the short Greenland summer.

Beneath the copper mountains of Fablun,
and England's coal mines, he flies,
in the shape of a dusty moth,
over the hymnbook
that rests on the knees of the pious miner.
On a lotus leaf he floats
down the sacred waters of the Ganges,
and the eye of the Hindu maid
gleams bright when she beholds him.

The Phoenix bird, dost thou not know him?
The Bird of Paradise,
the holy swan of song!
On the car of Thespis he sat
in the guise of a chattering raven,
and flapped his black wings,
smeared with the lees of wine;
over the sounding harp of Iceland
swept the swan's red beak;
on Shakespeare's shoulder he sat
in the guise of Odin's raven,
and whispered in the poet's ear
“Immortality!”
and at the minstrels' feast he fluttered
through the halls of the Wartburg.

The Phoenix bird, dost thou not know him?
He sang to thee the Marseillaise,
and thou kissedst the pen
that fell from his wing;
he came in the radiance of Paradise,
and perchance
thou didst turn away from him,
towards the sparrow who sat
with tinsel on his wings.

The Bird of Paradise,
renewed each century
born in flame,
ending in flame!
Thy picture,
in a golden frame,
hangs in the halls of the rich,
but thou thyself often fliest around,
lonely and disregarded,
a myth--
“The Phoenix of Arabia.”

In Paradise,
when thou wert born in the first rose,
beneath the Tree of Knowledge,
thou receivedst a kiss,
and thy right name was given thee
--thy name,
Poetry.