Phoenix

[heidi.h.tandy.c92 at alumni.upenn.edu]

No: HPFGUIDX 13032

Was reading through various fairy tales, doing research for a new 
chapter, and came across a Hans Christian Anderson story about the 
Phoenix - wanted to share it with y'all...


N 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.