Today, a bit difficult sonnet written by Gérard de Nerval and published in 1853.
The poem and the English translation is taken from this website that offers an analysis, because it is not an easy poem, trust me:
Click on that link and you will get the analysis line by line.As its title indicates, El Desdichado is a poem about loss of love due to fate: when Nerval first wrote it, it was called Le Destin. The final title refers to Walter Scott's Ivanhoe, where a mysterious knight whose fief was stolen appears at a tournament with an uprooted tree as his coat of arms, and El Desdichado as his motto. The Spanish word actually means "unhappy" and Scott may have wanted to use desherado, which means disinherited. But the difference doesn't matter, because both notions apply to Nerval's feelings. Like all poems, this one works by playing with juxtaposed opposite notions. The first quatrain focuses on how miserable he is while the second one retells his memories of happiness. The source of his past happiness is a woman, and he reminisces about his love for her in the final two tercets. All of this is done in dense, obscure verses which combine his experience with cultural references (literature, poetry, mythology, alchemy, astrology...), giving a really intense result.
