A Reading of ‘The Eagle’ by Lord Alfred Tennyson

The Eagle

The wrinkled sea beneath him crawls;
He watches from his mountain walls,
And like a thunderbolt he falls.

An eagle stands. He watches. He sees his prey and then—in a thunderclap of wings, he dives down down down… In our mind’s eye, we relive this shattering moment each time we recite Tennyson’s poem, as concise as a haiku and as rich as a novel.

“He clasps.” the first stanza begins. By rights, the eagle should be an “it.” But Tennyson personifies it. Perhaps the eagle, as a consequence, stands as an icon of masculine force. Is it the nature of the masculine to claim ownership? “Crooked hands” is an accurate description of an eagle’s talons, while also suggesting a certain ruthlessness.

(Liza Voronin/The Epoch Times)

“Close to the sun,” the eagle is like a god. Dwelling in “lonely lands” he occupies the spaces inhospitable to humanity—pure, bare and wild. “Ringed with the azure world,” he is so high up he is surrounded on all sides by the heavenly blue sky.

To my ear, there is a pause after “world” that gives added weight to the next phrase, “he stands.” Upright and still, the eagle displays strength, vigor, purpose: a heroic concentration of identity. The stress on “stands” is intensified by the rhyme, coming down for the third time. As we say the words, we can almost feel our back rising in a regal bearing.

The second stanza transforms our perception. We stare down from the eagle’s dizzying height and see the “wrinkled sea.” This simple phrase brilliantly captures the sense of looking at the ocean from a vast distance, where its pounding energies seem sluggish and puny. Crawling beneath the eagle, the sea is like a slave, cringing before its master.

The eagle “watches from his mountain walls,” like a king brooding from the battlements. Implicitly, the more we contemplate his fixed and silent form, the more we expect some sudden movement or cry. If we pause here when saying the words aloud, we can really feel the tension mount.

In sight and sound, the poem is plotted to perfection. With the precision of Hitchcock, Tennyson lets us see the eagle from every angle. We start with a close up of the “crooked hands,” pan up to the sun blazing above us, take in a 360 degree tracking shot of the sky, and then gaze down at the sea below us. We return to the eagle (perhaps zooming in on his watchful eye) and then, in a blur of feathers, he disappears.

Alliteration and rhyme help us to taste the scene on our tongue. Listen to that succession of hard “c” sounds in the opening stanza, which yield to the softer “w” sounds in the second. We pass from a sense of guttural harshness, of brute clutching and clinging, to a more expansive mood of imminent surprise. The triplets speed us toward the dramatic conclusion.

Tennyson creates a pattern of two syllable adjectives followed by monosyllabic nouns (e.g. “crooked hands,” “lonely lands,” and “azure world”) so that “thunderbolt,” as the only three syllable word, tears into the poem like a divine interruption.

The eagle’s helpless prey is kept out of sight. Why? I think Tennyson wants us to admire the eagle’s power and nobility of spirit, without having to admire the frenzy of the final act. There is no sensationalism here, no celebration of blood and gore.

The eagle’s “fall” heralds his triumph as he swoops to kill and yet, oddly, it sounds as if he has himself died. Life and death become one in a moment of absolute intensity.

Lord Alfred Tennyson (1809–1892) is an English poet best known for such poems as "The Charge of the Light Brigade," “The Lady of Shallot,” and "Crossing the Bar." Christopher Nield is a poet living in London. Email him at christophernield@hotmail.com.