by Poe · Cluster: Memory and Time · Memory · Nostalgia
Abstract
A short lyric contrasting the gentle paroquet ‘Romance’ of childhood with the tumultuous ‘Condor years’ of adulthood, lamenting lost leisure for poetry; on memory, time and the poet’s vocation.
Connections
Topoi: Immortality Through Verse, Fall from Innocence Motifs: Childhood, Memory, Birds, Time, Music and Song Themes & Concepts: Memory and Time, Nostalgia, Innocence and Experience, Artist and Society, Imagination Forms & Genres: Lyric
Testo integrale / Full text
Romance, who loves to nod and sing,
With drowsy head and folded wing,
Among the green leaves as they shake
Far down within some shadowy lake,
To me a painted paroquet
Hath been—a most familiar bird—
Taught me my alphabet to say—
To lisp my very earliest word
While in the wild wood I did lie,
A child—with a most knowing eye.
Of late, eternal Condor years
So shake the very Heaven on high
With tumult as they thunder by,
I have no time for idle cares
Through gazing on the unquiet sky.
And when an hour with calmer wings
Its down upon thy spirit flings—
That little time with lyre and rhyme
To while away—forbidden things!
My heart would feel to be a crime
Unless it trembled with the strings.
1829.