Eldorado Themes
Perseverance
Spending your whole life searching? Continuing to search even when your strength is gone and you're about to die? That's perseverance if we ever saw it! The knight's determination in "Eldorado," ho...
Death
Almost every line in "Eldorado" is about death, whether it's the knight's approaching death (his strength fails, he must go down the "valley of the shadow") or the death of his dream of ever findin...
Isolation
For the first half of "Eldorado," the knight is totally alone. It is only in line 15 that he meets somebody else, and only a "pilgrim shadow" at that. The shadow doesn't seem very real, and it is p...
Defeat
In the first three stanzas of "Eldorado," the speaker tells us that the knight has searched for this place for a really long time, but hasn't been able to find it. Bummer. That sure sounds like def...