Reflection's on The Eagle

Here is Alfred Tennyson’s famous poem the eagle. The Eagle is a brief but vivid glimpse into the world of this powerful bird. At first glance, the poem shows a very simple yet innovative kind of an understanding. This poem is very short but is full of meanings. In the initial three-line stanza, the eagle is pictured in a lofty position, on a crag ‘close to the sun’. Tennyson uses alliteration in the first line: ‘He clasps the crag with crooked hands’, a hard ‘c’ sound recurring and then continuing in the word ‘Close’ at the beginning of the second line. Tennyson likens the eagle to a person with the term ‘hands’. The alliteration of the phrase ‘lonely lands’ in the second line emphasizes the bird’s solitude. In the final line of the third stanza, the eagle is seen is being ‘Ring’d with the azure world”, in other words the sky, so once again his elevated position is focused on.

The opening line of the second stanza switches to the view below the mountain top in the personifying phrase ‘The wrinkled sea beneath him crawls’. The waves are reduced to the size of wrinkles, again emphasizing how far above the sea the eagle is. In the second line, the eagle is watching ‘from his mountain walls’, making his position sound secure, protected. In the final line, Tennyson uses a simile to create an image of the bird’s swift and powerful descent on his prey: ‘And like a thunderbolt he falls.’

In short, the poem tells us about a series of things an eagle does. We can see the eagle clinging through the mountains, flying to the air and surrounded by the blue sky. But, after reading through the poem, we can see that the eagle is refers to as he. Here, the poet’s, in my point of view is trying to implicate how the eagle is connected to the blue sky, the open air, and the ocean. Tennyson’s poem the Eagle has regular rhyme and uses other poetic devices like alliteration, personification and simile. The first three stanzas focus on the eagle but the final three focuses on the eagle’s world and nature. The literary devices of the poem and the powerful imaginary combination make the poem a simple poem to understand. It does not have any complication and it revolves into a world of an eagle which is unique.