Poe is remembered for "The Raven" and for tales that make readers check the locks, so it is a surprise to meet him in a mood this gentle and confessional. "Romance" is a short poem about where poetry comes from and why, in adult life, writing or reading it can feel like something done in secret. The word "romance" here is not a love story. It is the spirit of imagination, which the poem pictures as a creature with wings.
The first stanza is a dreamy scene of childhood. Romance "loves to nod and sing / With drowsy head and folded wing," a half-asleep bird among leaves that "shake / Far down within some shadowy lake." The leaves are seen as if reflected in water, so the whole world feels one step removed from the real one. Then the poem turns personal. "A painted paroquet" (an older spelling of parakeet, a small parrot) taught the speaker "my alphabet" and "my very earliest word." The choice of a parrot is shrewd. A parrot repeats sounds it does not yet understand, just as a small child does, and "painted" suggests both colour and artifice. Imagination becomes the child's first schoolteacher, and language arrives wrapped in feathers and play. The stanza's last line, a child "with a most knowing eye," casts a faint shadow. Even then, the boy seems to sense more than he should.
The second stanza replaces the parrot with something far larger. Time itself is now "eternal Condor years," huge birds that "shake the very Heaven on high / With tumult as they thunder by." The verb "shake" returns from the first stanza, but the gently moving leaves have become a quaking sky. The speaker has "no time for idle cares," and even the sky is "unquiet." Yet the bird imagery never disappears. When a calm hour arrives, it comes "with calmer wings" and flings "its down upon my spirit." Down means soft feathers, and the word quietly echoes "far down" in the lake. The same flock that thundered past can, for a moment, settle like a blanket.
The form supports this contrast. The lines are mostly four-beat, eight-syllable iambic lines, as in "Romance, who loves to nod and sing." In the first stanza the short lines and tidy couplets (sing/wing, shake/lake, bird/word, lie/eye) give a nursery-rhyme lilt. In the second stanza the same short lines must carry heavier loads. "Eternal Condor years" piles stresses together, and the rhymes bunch into triplets: high, by, sky, then wings, flings, things, strings. The effect is of pressure building. The dashes, as in "Hath been--a most familiar bird--", make the speaker sound like someone thinking aloud and correcting himself. The second stanza also runs a line longer than the first, as though the confession needs one more breath.
That extra line carries the poem's central idea. Spending a little time "with lyre and rhyme" is called "forbidden things," and the heart "would feel to be a crime / Unless it trembled with the strings." Here "trembled" is the third and last vibration in the poem, after the shaking leaves and the shaking Heaven. This time the trembling is inward. The rhyme of "rhyme" with "crime" sets the pleasure and the guilt side by side, and "strings" works twice, for the lyre's strings and for the heart's. The poem's answer to its own guilt is that verse is idle only when nothing in the writer moves. Poetry that makes the heart tremble needs no excuse.
That is why this small poem repays attention. In twenty-one lines it traces a life from the parrot's borrowed words to the condor's relentless years. It also states, in its own musical terms, what poetry must be to earn its place in a busy world.