“A knight on horseback looking for the mythical city”

Eldorado By Edgar Allan Poe
This poem to me is I think just as good as “The Raven” as it goes along the same emotional beats that it was trying to hit. It goes into the greed that humans are capable of and often doom themselves trying to find something abstract like meaning or purpose when you really have to make that your own. The knight in this poem has at one point I believe been all of us humans. We want so desperately to find what we are looking for be it happiness, love, wealth, purpose, meaning. These are all like the mythical city of Eldorado nothing but illusions that we choose to believe because that is what our society is built upon. We see others with it and it only wants us to be apart of it because we as humans are hard-wired to be want to be like other people no matter how much someone tells you that its okay to stick out it still really hurts when you don’t, for me at least. Yet the want to like everyone else could also very well be its own “Eldorado”. Something that doesn’t really exist but gives people purpose in order to deal with the horror of our own existence.

The search for Eldorado is something that might not exist but it does give the knight purpose and hope for tomorrow. Yet in doing so he grows old having never accomplished his dream only when he enters the “Valley of the Shadow” does he find even a clue of what he’s looking for. This could very well be interpreted as the Valley of death in which one can finally find peace from having to keep to continue to work on whatever it is that keeps one going. What we can surmise from the poem is that the knight wanted to find the city for the purpose of becoming wealthy and while that is good for the time it was written, I believe that this way of thinking has fallen out in recent years due to people finding out that American capitalism just isn’t working anymore. It only works for the people who want to keep spreading the myth of Eldorado.

I like this poem because it reminds me that I’m not like the knight in the story even though I used to be. I do not have to keep looking for my own Eldorado because I know that it’s just not worth it. But the sad part is that the rich people of the world want people to be their own knights chasing windmills. They distract us with so many directions to go in search of what we want that its just too much to handle all at once. It’s a maze of unknowns and the shade is of little reprieve. But knowledge of what is real and what is just a mere illusion meant to block your path is the real key to finding out what is your true calling.

I cannot really tell if the shadow is the antagonist or helping the knight when it tells him the directions to Eldorado and to “Ride, boldly ride” It sounds encouraging but at the same time foreboding on what could come next but the poem ends before we are given even a glimpse of what the knight sees. However it does mark me as a sort of positive as he has been lost for so long and has finally been given some direction in his life and that I feel like is something that we could all use at some point in our lives.