Tennyson's the Eagle

The appeal of Tennyson's "The Eagle" to the visual imagination is startling. Within the space of six tetrametric lines the viewpoint zooms backwards from macrophotographic detail of the eagle's talons to an aerial pan over a mountainous region taking in 360o of unobstructed horizon. Then it cuts to a view looking down on the sea, into which vertiginous vertical the eagle, after a pause, plummets.

These radical movements are set against a simple dialectic of stasis in the first stanza and motion in the second, anticipated in the contrast between the static "clasps" of line four, and concentrated in the last words of each stanza; in the first "he stands", and in the second "he falls". To complement this dialectic, the form of the poem is resolutely bipartite; two chunky tetrametric triplets have balance and poise where heroic couplets, for example, would have continuity and flow.

There is, however, a kind of continuity; the dynamism increases gradually from the stasis of the first stanza, through the crawling of the sea and the tense hiatus of the eagle's gaze, to the sudden speed of the final line, and this continuous dynamic operates across the stanza division, sharing a structure with the imagery of the poem.

The imagery is subtle and ambiguous at first. Do the "crooked hands" suggest age, or are they the crooked hands of a Gothic malevolent? Is to be "ring'd with the azure world" to be bounded or not? Line four brings some clarification; if the eagle is old, his age is reflected by the "wrinkled sea"; this is the age of the elements, not of infirmity. The sea crawls, not just because its motions are made small by our altitude, but as if in obeisance. Line five brings with its pause in the dynamic a hiatus in the growing metaphorical suggestion of power; if his mountains are "walls" from which he watches, is the eagle a sentinel, a defender? No, in the last line the eagle is "like a thunderbolt", like the weapon of Zeus; he is of this world but comes from heaven bringing destruction and arbitrary justice. He "falls" to his kill, riding on gravity. The kill we do not see, however, nor will any of us be witnesses to our own deaths