The Phoenix Bird

Author: Andersen Hans Christian | Genre: Tale | Year: | Catalogue: Global database Все варианты сказки на сайте

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.