The Phoenix Bird

"The Phoenix Bird" is an allegorical short piece by the Danish writer Hans Christian Andersen, first published in May 1850. The story begins in the Garden of Eden: in a rose bush beneath the Tree of Knowledge, a bird is born from the first rose, its feathers like the light of dawn, its song clear as a spring. When Adam and Eve are driven from Paradise, a spark from the angel's flaming sword falls into the bird's nest; the bird dies in the flames, yet from the red egg in the nest flies a new bird—the only phoenix in the world. It then wanders through the deserts of Arabia, the northern lights of Lapland, the brief summer of Greenland, the depths of the copper mountain at Falun in Sweden, and the coal mines of England; it drifts on lotus leaves down the Ganges in India, and alights by a mother's cradle and on a poet's shoulder. Andersen uses this undying bird to link scenes from different lands and eras, making it the embodiment of the spirit of poetry and art: consumed by fire and sacrifice, yet always reborn from the flames. The piece is very short and has almost no plot development; it reads more like a lyrical fable written in prose-poem style, and its ending reveals that the phoenix's true name, given in Paradise, is "Poetry."