"Why do not you come?" A discussion of Mihai Eminescu’s poem

Mihai Eminescu, 1850-1889, was a romantic writer, journalist, and poet, often celebrated as Romania’s greatest and most famous poet. For many years he was considered the national poet of Romania and was called “the most important figure in Romanian culture”.

Even now, his fame permeates modern Romania. For example, his face has been engraved on a couple of Romanian paper coins. Additionally, numerous statues and busts of Eminescu can be found throughout the country. There are several schools and libraries and other buildings named after Eminescu. And the anniversaries of his birth and death are celebrated with national celebrations.

The poet

Eminescu was born and raised in Moldova, the northeastern region of Romania. He attended school until he was 16 years old and began to publish some of his poems at that age in a literary magazine in Budapest, Hungary. For several years, Eminescu worked as an employee for a theater company in the newly named capital city of Bucharest. Throughout this period he continued to write and publish his poetry.

Eminescu left the company after three years and traveled to Vienna, where he studied philosophy for three years. During this period he contributed political articles and poems to a local literary magazine. He also became a contributing journalist for a Budapest newspaper.

Then Eminescu went to Berlin for two years, where he continued his studies. After Berlin, he moved to Iasi, the cultural and economic center of Moldova, Romania, where he worked as director of the Central Library. The impressive library is now named after him in his honor. Eminescu also became editor of one of the local Iasi newspapers.

After three years in Iasi, he returned to Bucharest, where he spent most of the rest of his life. He became editor-in-chief of a major Bucharest newspaper for which he wrote his most famous political articles, including those supporting the push towards international recognition of Romanian independence. Also during this period he wrote and published his most famous poems, including “The Evening Star”.

In 1883, Eminescu was hospitalized due to his deteriorating health. He was diagnosed with syphilis and manic depression. A few years later, his health deteriorated further and he was treated with mercury injections, the standard treatment for syphilis. For the last six years of his life he wrote nothing of importance and was in and out of hospitals and sanitariums. He died at the age of 39 in 1889.

The poem

In 1883, while Eminescu was in a sanatorium in Vienna, Titu Maiorescu published a complete volume of his poems entitled “Poesii”. Maiorescu commented in his foreword to the volume that Eminescu was always “too indifferent and unambitious about the future fate of his work” to create a complete publication himself.

Eminescu’s poems present a wide range of themes, including nature, love, history, politics, and social issues. His study of philosophy, especially of Schopenhauer, also influenced his poetic works. The influence of his poems on Romanian culture is so strong that in Romanian schools the study of his poems is a requirement. An analysis of your “The Evening Star” is often part of the graduation exam.

“Why do not you come?” is a touching and romantic love poem about a man’s longing for his beloved. The poem is easily read and recited due to its simple and easily recognizable form.

The form of the poem includes 6 quartets, stanzas of four lines each. This is the most common of all stanza forms in European poetry. The quatrains have a rhyme scheme of aabb, which creates two short couplets per stanza, one of the simplest rhyme schemes in poetry. The rhythm of the poem is the easily recognizable iambic tetrameter. All the verses, except the first, are regular, and consist of four iambic feet of two syllables, the second syllable of each foot being stressed.

The person Eminescu’s poem refers to is probably Veronica Micle, the love of his life and the woman he hoped to marry, although circumstances kept them apart. They met while Eminescu was studying in Vienna. Despite the fact that Micle was married to a university professor thirty years her senior, she developed a close relationship with the attractive and romantic Eminescu.

Micle became a short story writer and romantic poet, her style not surprisingly influenced by Eminescu’s. He published numerous poems, several of which were dedicated to his relationship with Eminescu.

After her husband’s death, Micle and Eminescu came close to getting married, but numerous stresses, including developing diseases, prevented them from doing so. When he became more seriously ill, Micle moved to Bucharest and cared for Eminescu for the last two years of his life. Grief-stricken after his death, Micle died two months after self-induced arsenic poisoning.

It was in 1887, just before Micle’s arrival in Bucharest, that Eminescu wrote “Why don’t you come?”

Why do not you come?

By Mihai Eminescu

Translated by Corneliu M. Popescu

Watch the swallows come out of the eaves

And the yellow leaves of the walnut fall,

The vines with the autumn frosts are numb,

Why don’t you come, why don’t you come?

Oh come to the embrace of my arms

So I can look at your face

And lay my head in grateful rest

Against your chest, against your chest!

Do you remember when we got lost?

The meadows and the clear secret,

I kissed you amidst blooming thyme

How many times, how many times?

Some women on earth there are

Whose eyes shine like the evening star,

But I know her charm no matter what

As you are not, as you are not!

Because you always shine in my soul

Softer than the glare of starlight,

More splendid than the rising sun,

Beloved, beloved!

But now it’s late fall

The leaves have fallen from the branch,

The fields are bare, the birds are mute.

Why don’t you come, why don’t you come?