THE PHOENIX BIRD
© Hans Christian Andersen
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 Hindoo 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
Shakspeare'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.
THE END
Click on the picture (Clip+Relaxing sounds)
Click on the
Banner Philoxenia
Georgios
Paraskevopoulos (Philoxenia Ning Platform)