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 pervades modern Romania. For example, her face has been engraved on a pair of Romanian banknotes. In addition, 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 observed 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 publishing some of his poems at that age in a literary magazine in Budapest, Hungary. For several years, Eminescu worked as a clerk for a theater company in the newly named capital 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 newspaper in Budapest.
Eminescu then 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 the editor of one of Iasi’s local 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 drive toward international recognition of Romania’s 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. During the last six years of his life he wrote nothing of importance and was in and out of hospitals and sanitariums. He died at age 39 in 1889.
The poem
In 1883, while Eminescu was in a sanatorium in Vienna, Titu Maiorescu published a collected volume of his poems entitled “Poesii”. Maiorescu commented in his foreword to the volume that Eminescu was always “too carefree and unambitious about the future fate of his work” to create a collected publication himself.
Eminescu’s poems present a wide range of themes, including nature, love, history, politics, and social issues. His study of philosophy, especially Schopenhauer, also influenced his poetic work. The influence of his poems in the Romanian culture is so strong that in Romanian schools the study of his poems is a requirement. Often an analysis of his “The Evening Star” is 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 quatrains, stanzas of four lines each. This is the most common of all stanza forms in European poetry. 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, made up of four disyllabic iambic feet, with the second syllable of each foot accentuated.
The person to whom Eminescu’s poem is addressed is probably Veronica Micle, the love of his life and the woman he hoped to marry, although circumstances separated them. They met while Eminescu was studying in Vienna. Although 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 a romantic poet, her style, unsurprisingly, influenced by Eminescu’s. She published numerous poems, several of which were dedicated to her relationship with Eminescu.
After her husband’s death, Micle and Eminescu were about to get married, but numerous stresses, including the development of their illnesses, prevented them from doing so. When she became more seriously ill, Ella Micle moved to Bucharest and cared for Eminescu for the last two years of her life. Grieved after her death, Micle died of self-induced arsenic poisoning two months later.
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
See the swallows fly out of the eaves
and the yellow leaves of the walnut tree fall,
Autumn frosted vines are numb,
Why don’t you come, why don’t you come?
Oh come into the embrace of my arms
so that I can see your face,
And lay my head in grateful rest
Against your chest, against your chest!
Remember when we strayed?
the meadows and the clear secret,
I kissed you between 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 come what may,
As you are not, as you are not!
because you shine in my soul always
Softer than the glow of starlight,
More splendid than the rising sun,
Beloved, beloved!
But now it’s late in autumn,
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?
