Here is another essay on poetry. As the date shows, it's been a while since I wrote it. It can serve as an example for my students, but all are free to read and enjoy.
Charles Brent Oliver
Dr. Borges
ENGL 1020 SA1
5 March 2015
A Close Reading of Tennyson’s “the Eagle”
Tennyson’s poem, “the Eagle,” is a mainstay of introductory poetry courses and textbooks. The reason for this is obvious: it is very brief, and far simpler than many more complex poems (anything by Milton comes to mind). However, although simple, it is also elegant and beautiful, and the product of much more conscious effort than might appear at first glance. Some sense of this effort can be gleaned through an examination of the poem’s use of certain musical devices, specifically alliteration, consonance, and rhyme.
The poem consists of six end-stopped lines in iambic tetrameter, divided into two three-line stanzas. Each stanza is a single compound sentence, and its three lines are bound together by rhyme into a triplet:
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.
The rhymes, as one can see, are masculine, which fit perfectly into the iambic rhythm (i.e. since the even syllables are accented, the accent falls on the final syllable of each line, making masculine rhymes natural).
The rhymes are also perfect or full rhymes, as opposed to those rhymes variously called near, off, or slant rhymes. To achieve this, the poet takes advantage of an interesting grammatical fact about English: the common pluralizing suffix, “-s,” is identical in form to the inflectional ending that is used to make present indicative verbs agree with a third-person singular subject, such as “he.” As a result, the poet is able, in the first stanza, to rhyme two plural nouns (“hands” and “lands”) with a present indicative verb with “he” as the subject (“he stands”). In a similar, but not identical fashion, in the second stanza, the plural noun “walls” (5) is sandwiched between and rhymed with two third-person singular, present indicative verbs, (“The wrinkled sea…crawls”; “he falls”).
The poem also makes use of alliteration and consonance, especially in the first stanza. The sounds used are the related sounds: L, R, & W, as well as the consonant clusters CL & CR. The alliterative pattern begins with the consonant clusters, which occur in all the accented syllables in the first line, save the last (“…clasps…crags…crooked…”), and continue into the first word of the next line (“close”). The alliteration then shifts to the lone consonants: “lonely lands, / Ringed with the azure world…” The “r” in “azure” and the “rl” in “world” extend this effect to an instance of consonance, the general recurrence of consonant sounds, instead of just alliteration.
This continues into the second stanza, where we find “the wrinkled sea beneath him crawls; [note the recurrence of the “CR” cluster] / He watches from his mountain walls,” (4-5); by the final line, the alliteration is gone, and the consonance significantly lightened, so as to emphasize the final image of the poem, conveyed via simile.
Perhaps more important than the simile is the grammatical parallelism between the final words of the two stanzas. We recall that each stanza is a single sentence, and those two sentences work together to produce the effect of the poem. They present two images, the first static, the second dynamic. Each stanza’s imagery culminates in the last two words of the stanza, and the contrast between the two stanzas is concentrated in the antonymy of these two final expressions, and their verbs. The last words of those stanzas are simply this:
“…he stands //…he falls.”
It doesn’t get much simpler than that.
We could go on, speaking of how Tennyson builds his poem out of simple one- and two-syllable words (“thunderbolt” in the final line is the only word longer than two syllables), varying the placements of the longer words to vary the poem’s rhythm—but this should be enough to prove the point that even with a poem as simple as “the Eagle,” it is possible to look deeply into what is done and how. The purpose here, as with all criticism, is to help the reader understand the subtle ways of the poetic art, and how it may take much effort to produce such an effortless read as Tennyson’s “the Eagle.”
Works Cited
Tennyson, Alfred. “The Eagle.” Perrine’s Literature: Structure, Sound, and Sense. Instructor’s
ed. Thomas R. Arp & Greg Johnson eds. Boston: Thomson-Wadsworth, 2006. 649.
