Poetry Friday {Bedighted, Delighted}

Crowd duty.

El Dorado

Gaily bedight,
A gallant night
In sunshine and in shadow,
Had journeyed long,

Singing a song,
In search of El Dorado.

But he grew old –
This knight so bold –
And – o’er his heart a shadow
Fell as he found

No spot of ground
That looked like El Dorado.

And, as his strength
Failed him at length,
He met a pilgrim shadow –
“Shadow, said he,

“Where can it be –
This land of El Dorado?”

“Over the Mountains
Of the Moon,
Down the Valley of the Shadow,
Ride, boldly ride,”

The shade replied –
“If you seek for El Dorado.”

by Edgar Allen Poe

I love the word “bedight.” According to the OED, it’s an archaic form of the word “adorned,” or, more familiarly, bedecked. It sounds so festive. I shall go to the ball bedight!” (Okay, maybe not.)

The lines sort of trot out in a sing-song rhyming fashion (dum-de-de-DUM-de-DUM-de-DUM…) which means that they’re often recited by children taxed with learning poetry at school. Does anyone have this one memorized?

The Scots are good with being bedighted. (Or, should that be “bedight”?) The Company last week were anxious to see Scottish folk in kilts — which, many Americans believe all Scots wear all the time. (Think again, people.*) So, we hied ourselves to a castle, which is a typical place of pageantry, and The Company got all the national costume their hearts could stand — for that day, anyway.

The spectacle of the guard in the Queen’s colors (I think. The socks are definitely from clan Campbell/Argyll. No, seriously. Where else do we get argyle socks!?) marching with stiff legs and swinging arms, shouting and saluting and doing guard-ish things brought this poem to mind. They were quite gaily bedight, even in the fog and the wind, even in their routine jobs of making sure the tourists didn’t chase down the marching band or get in front of the cannons during the 21-gun salute (You would not believe how many people switch their brains off when they turn on their minicams. We saw close calls.). No matter what they were doing, bedecked and bedight the men and women of the Scottish regiments did it looking well put together.

(There were tons of junior enlisted guys and girls in regular old camouflage utilities and boots, if that makes any of you with soldiers in the family who don’t get to wear cute kilts feel any better. They had to wear a goofy hat with a bobble, too. A very goofy hat…)

If you’ve only ever heard this poem recited in the John Wayne film of the same name, and you’re wondering what the big deal is over El Dorado, there are two meanings that most junior high students learn — one returns you to Conquistador history. Francisco Orellana, Gonzalo Pizarro, Hernán Cortez and a heavy rotation of Spanish explorers were after a city of gold that didn’t actually exist. In the literal sense, this sort of references those guys searching for a lost city, since “El Dorado” tended to be the name given to any place which promised great wealth. In a figurative sense, the knight is a kind of Everyman, searching for that indefinable …something along his life’s path… and never quite finding it. But does El Dorado exist? What will our gallant knight really find in the Valley of Shadow? Rest, at the very least, and the end of his long journey.

Poetry Friday is hosted today by Two Writing Teachers. Their focus today is Father’s Day which doesn’t usually have a lot of bedighting in it, but today we can make an exception. Happy Friday.

Bedight down to his socks, he was.

(*A decent history of the whole kilt thing in Scotland can be found here).