Desert Island Poems: ‘The Eagle’ by Alfred, Lord Tennyson

"There is so much to be learned from this six-line poem."

The Eagle

By Alfred, Lord Tennyson

He clasps the crag with crooked hands;

Close to the sun in lonely lands,

Ring'd with the azure world, he stands.

The wrinkled sea beneath him crawls;

He watches from his mountain walls,

And like a thunderbolt he falls.

I’ve written before about my love of animal poems (you can read my piece on Edward Thomas’s ‘Owl’ here) and this one is also from the top drawer. Michael Longley once said that the problem with a lot of contemporary poetry is that it goes on for too long: “I’m not against ambition and reach, but if you can say it in four lines, why waste your time saying it in more? Challenge the world by all means, but it’s bad for your poetry to take steroids.”

Well, I think it’s safe to say Longley would have approved of Tennyson’s ‘The Eagle’, coming in at six lines, in two tercets of full rhymes. I don’t think there’s a poem I’ve read which captures in language the action of something so clearly. 

How does Tennyson do it?

He employs an iambic tetrameter which is a line of 8 syllables with four stresses using an iambic footing (i.e. -/-/-/-/). In the hands of a lesser poet, the rhyming words in such short lines would be far too heavy and feel heavy handed, but Tennyson manages to smooth over the cracks with punctuation, namely the semicolon and the comma in exactly the same place in each stanza. 

What's the Poem about?

The poem is about the majesty and power of the eagle, but it’s also a poem about the majesty and power that can be achieved through poetry itself. The brevity of the poem, at six lines, gives the poem a sense of the speed at which the eagle falls; the poem, like the eagle, appears on the page ‘like a thunderbolt’. Tennyson may be a prime example of a poet who is pale and male, but I defy anyone to say this poem, in its energy and economy, is stale. There is so much to be learned from this six line poem. 

First Tercet

In the first line, it could be argued the poet lays on the consonance a bit too thickly with all the ‘c’ sounds in ‘clasped’, ‘cragged’ and ‘crooked’, but, by the same token, doesn’t it perfectly capture the eagle’s talons? ‘Hands’ gives the eagle a human-like quality which is a bit disturbing, but also opens up the metaphor that the eagle may be a symbol for a powerful ruler or dictator, particularly with what comes in the second line, with how he’s ‘close to the sun’ which conjures up ideas of Icarus, and the perils of too much power. The fact the eagle is in ‘lonely lands’ also summons up a sense of separation, that this is a creature who is an outsider, above and beyond all other life on earth. The ‘lonely sands’ also chimes with the ‘lone and level sands’ at the end of P. B. Shelley’s Ozymandias - the tyrannical leader whose statue now lies shattered in a desert. The ‘crooked’ hands also suggests something untoward and the corrupting nature of power. All of this, and we’re not even onto line three!

The way in which the eagle ‘stands’ in the third line enforces this idea of it being a metaphor for a powerful leader. ‘Ring’d by the azure world’ is a reference to the way in which birds are ringed by their owners for identification, and in this case, Tennyson is referring to the way in which the eagle’s only limits are the limits of the sky - a powerful image. The comma after ‘world’ and placing ‘he stands’ at the end of the line is an inversion of grammar (normally we would say ‘he stands ring’d by the azure world’) and shouldn’t work, but Tennyson does this to end the tercet on the strength of the image of the eagle looking down on the world. So far, as we can see, there is not a word out of place.

Second Tercet

When we move onto the second tercet, the sea is ‘wrinkled’ and ‘crawls’ suggesting the inferiority of the natural world in comparison to this predator. Tennyson’s use of ‘beneath him’ also reinforces this idea of superiority and how the sea is somehow a lesser part of nature. The verb ‘crawls’ though also has connotations of teeming, i.e. if something is crawling with something, it suggests it’s full of it, and in this case, the sea is teeming with prey, fish being the eagle’s primary food source. The fact he ‘watches from his mountain walls’ suggests that the mountain is his protection and his lookout point; nobody can enter through the mountain walls, but the eagle can attack from there. The alliteration of ‘w’ is pleasing, but I can’t help but feel Tennyson could have found a better verb here than ‘watches’, unless he was trying to force the metaphor of the ruler, planning his coup from his castle. ‘Mountain walls’ is also oxymoronic, as walls suggest uniformity and design, but mountains are anything but uniform and designed. Perhaps Tennyson is nodding here to the ordered chaos to be found in the natural world, and echoes the ‘crooked hands’ of the first line.

Ending

He ends the poem with a simile, which in many ways is a bit of a cliché, tried and tested, and even something your creative writing class teacher may have warned against. However, doesn’t it work well here? What’s interesting is how unlike the the semicolon at the end of the first line, and the comma at the end of the second line in both tercets, he chooses not to insert a comma before the last two words of the last line, however in many ways the poem doesn’t need it, as the rhythm somehow conjures up the moment of the swooping eagle so brilliantly. It’s also not often that a poet can get away with using ‘thunderbolt’ in a poem, but it works magnificently here in conveying the sudden, powerful fall of the eagle. What intrigues me most about the last line is his use of ‘falls’, a verb which suggests accident, and weakness and lack of control. When read in the light of political leaders it also suggests a kind of decline or resignation. But, of course, ‘strikes’, for example, wouldn't rhyme with ‘crawls’ even if it might be more in line with what we think of when an eagle targets its prey. ‘Falls’ also suggests that his movements are involuntary, and that he’s not having to actively move; it suggests a kind of effortlessness on the eagle’s part. But the real genius of the poem is how Tennyson leaves us with the image of the eagle descending - it’s an elliptical ending which places the image to the fore, leaving us as readers to imagine whether the bird catches his prey or not, and in many ways, it doesn’t matter as it’s the bird’s flight which, in itself, is so captivating.