poem : " The Eagle"

 Hello readers! 

This blog is  related to  the thinking activity : "The Eagle "  poem.

☆  Introduction about   poet : 

Alfred, Lord Tennyson was the most renowned poet of the Victorian era. His work includes 'In Memoriam,' 'The Charge of the Light Brigade' and 'Idylls of the King.'Tennyson was appointed to the position of Poet Laureate; Elizabeth Barrett Browning and Leigh Hunt had also been considered.Tennyson was the first to be raised to a British peerage for his writing  further  biography  of Alfred, Lord Tennyson  click here .Inspiration for "The Eagle" came to him during a trip to the Pyrenees Mountains on the Spanish-French border during the summer of 1830.

☆ About   the poem  :

'The Eagle'

by Alfred, Lord Tennyson

He clasps the crag with crooked hands;

Close to the sun in lonely lands,

Ringed with the azure world, he stands.

The wrinkled sea beneath him crawls;

He watches from his mountain walls,

And like a thunderbolt he falls.

Lord Tennyson in his poem “The Eagle” describes an eagle perched on a high mountain crag. The climax of the incident is the moment the bird suddenly shoots down on its prey. The eagle is an unusually large bird of prey. It has a keen sharp eyesight, plashing speed and great strength. It enables it to strike from a great distance of its unsuspecting prey. It kills and carries off animals as large as lambs.

 In the poem, the poet describes all this behaviour patterns of the bird so the reader can see and feel that the bird becomes a suitable symbol for the theme.

 The poet presents a vivid picture of a lonely coastal atmosphere. It is surrounded with ranges of tall and huge rocks. The sky seems to be cloudless. So, it could be a bright and sunny day. The sea doesn't seem to be rough. The centre-focus is the eagle in thisclear picture."The Eagle" is a short, six-line poem that is rich with descriptive imagery of the natural world. This poem provides a vivid image of a proud eagle atop a mountain.

The Eagle’ by Alfred Lord Tennyson portrays the swiftness and agility of the king of birds. The shortness of the poem is a reference to an eagle that is ready to latch onto its prey. It is like a monarch of nature, keeping a strategic distance from the metaphorical “wrinkled sea” crawling below. The poet is no doubt impressed by the bird’s agility and capacity. ‘The Eagle’ by Tennyson was a source of inspiration to Ted Hughes. He wrote ‘Hawk Roosting’ by imitating the Tennysonian model.

The eagle is the active figure in the poem and seems to possess the power of choice in addition to an implied power to destroy.

Tennyson uses lush and vivid language to powerfully communicate the image of the eagle clutching the crag in its "crooked hands" far above the "wrinkled sea" that "crawls." The choice of words.

Alfred, Lord Tennyson’s poem “The Eagle” uses imagery to portray the king of the skies: the eagle. Tennyson traveled in the Pyrenees where he often saw eagles circling overhead.One of the prominent themes in this poem is that even the most majestic of creatures (including people) have limitations. In poetry and literature, the eagle is often a symbol for majesty, power.

poem is the majesty of nature. Man cannot usually see the eagle because of the places that it chooses to build its nests. Most of the time man can only imagine what the eagle's movement and life are like. The freedom and beauty of this unparalleled bird is mother nature at its most pure.

 ☆ Critical  analysis of the  poem :

In the first stanza, the poet creates a setting where a lone eagle stands on a crag of a mountain overlooking the sea with the sky surrounding it like a backdrop. The visual imagery is further elaborated with the color ‘azure’ describing the beauty of the sky. The terms ‘lonely lands’ could be referring to the immense stretches of sea and sky. The image is continued in the next line with the metaphor ‘azure world’. This depicts a vast space where the bird could fly free unopposed as we know that the eagle is a powerful creature with sharp vision and strength as a predator.

Through the eyes of this powerful predator, the sea below him is a ‘wrinkled sea’ that ‘crawls beneath him’. The fact that the creature stands on a crag shows how unreachable he is to man. The poet thus creates an image that portrays the eagle as a creation of nature which is also protected by nature. In the line “From his mountain walls’’, ‘walls’ suggest protection for the eagle, which lives in a place almost inaccessible to humans, protected and unreachable in a beautiful azure eyrie of sorts with a massive space like the sky and a large area of sea. The last line, ‘like a thunderbolt he falls’, is an understatement because an eagle does not just fall off a cliff; it would dive to catch its prey or reach a place where his sharp vision caught some attention.

Throughout the poem, however, we see that the poet has attempted to humanize the eagle through use of pronouns ‘he’, ‘him’ and ‘his’. Instead of using ‘claws’ which seems like a more appropriate term to describe a bird, he uses ‘hands’. Similarly, the actions of a bird are also termed differently: ‘stands’ instead of ‘perches’ and ‘falls’ instead of ‘dives’. Thus, the poet could be using the eagle as a symbol of masculinity; a great man powerfully portrayed as possessing very sharp vision and strength. Man is an excellent and clever predator but, a predator nevertheless; with the ability to destroy somebody else’s life. In the setting created by the poet, he is passive till the climax when he dives like a great man who keeps his powers in reserve till the right moment. This man is not just a man but he is transformed into a superhero living at a very high vantage point secure and in control of his own world.

The debate between man and nature and who has the ultimate power to control is discussed with subtlety. The sea, sky, and mountains are all elements of nature while the sea and sky symbolize freedom. Within such limitless freedom, the ‘mountain walls’ other than offering protection also constrain man’s freedom (unlike the bird who could fly above all). The eagle is adapted to flying in any direction but when considering the eagle as a man, he falls off the cliff. Ultimately what controls the man is gravity, which is a force of nature. Tennyson thus places nature above man. Contradicting this viewpoint, another perspective is how the poet creates an imaginary world, but without the ability to exclude humans. Thus, humans are also integral to nature. Then the first argument gets revived when we see how nature in turn controls man who cannot challenge the changes he has to undergo. ‘the wrinkled sea beneath him crawls’, Although ambiguous, it could suggest personification of man and his life cycle, because ‘wrinkled’ suggests old age and ‘crawls’ suggests infancy. Thus, the impending philosophical debate is also then open to the reader whether man is above or below nature.

Lord Tennyson is   used a two stanza poem that is separated out into two sets of three lines, known as tercets. These tercets follow a very simple rhyme scheme that conforms to a pattern of AAA BBB. The poem also makes use of the metrical pattern of iambic tetrameter.

Personification is when a non-human object or an animal is given human qualities. In the first stanza the eagle is personified as Tennyson says, "He clasps the crag with crooked hands." and "Ring'd with the azure world he stands." Of course, he doesn't have hands, he has talons, and he doesn't stand, he perches.

Thank you ...