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The Full Text of “The Eagle”
1He clasps the crag with crooked hands;
2Close to the sun in lonely lands,
3Ringed with the azure world, he stands.
4The wrinkled sea beneath him crawls:
5He watches from his mountain walls,
6And like a thunderbolt he falls.
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“The Eagle” Introduction
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"The Eagle" is Alfred, Lord Tennyson's short-but-forceful appreciation of a mighty predator. Marveling at the grandeur of an eagle and at its stunning speed and strength as it swoops on its prey, the poem's speaker has a face-to-face confrontation with the sheer awesome power of nature. "The Eagle" first appeared in the 1851 edition of Tennyson's Poems.
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“The Eagle” Summary
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The eagle grasps the rocky cliff with his gnarled talons, standing on a remote mountaintop so high that it almost seems to touch the sun. He stands there at the center of the wide blue world.
Far below him, the waves of the ocean look like wrinkles in cloth. He observes the world from his fortress-like mountain—and then swoops down as fast as a bolt of lightning.
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“The Eagle” Themes
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The Awesome Power of Nature
This short poem describes an eagle perched watchfully above a grand landscape, ready to hunt. When at last the bird spots its prey and attacks, it descends like a “thunderbolt,” a figure of awe-inspiring power (and one with all sorts of mythological connotations, evoking the might of gods like Zeus and Thor). Through its depiction of this astonishing eagle, the poem illustrates the power, beauty, and ruthlessness of the natural world.
The poem's speaker presents the eagle as a masterful figure in a sweeping landscape. Perched haughtily above the wide “azure world,” this eagle surveys his terrain like a god. Just to look at a majestic bird like this, the speaker’s wonderstruck language suggests, is to come face to face with the power of nature itself: as the king of this mountainous landscape, the eagle seems to represent all the might of the natural world.
That might is majestic and compelling in part because it’s dangerous. When the eagle plunges from its perch “like a thunderbolt”—a thunderbolt about to smite some unsuspecting rabbit or squirrel far below—the poem suggests that being amazed by nature also means approaching its power with respect and humility (and a little wholesome fear). This eagle, in short, sums up all of nature’s power, glory, and danger in one feathery body. (Perhaps the poem also hints at the power, glory, and danger of some of the qualities eagles often symbolize, like freedom, insight, and intellect.)
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Line-by-Line Explanation & Analysis of “The Eagle”
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Line 1
He clasps the crag with crooked hands;
If readers skipped over the poem's title, the first line would seem deeply mysterious. The speaker launches straight into a description of a figure perched at the top of a mountain, clinging to the rock with his "crooked hands": a bit of imagery that is at once a vivid depiction of an eagle's knobbly talons and a peculiar moment of personification. Those "crooked hands" make this eagle seem like a strange old man sitting on a mountainside—or, for that matter, a god who "clasps" the whole mountainside in his hands.
Even in this first line, then, readers get the sense that this eagle has a little more power and personality than your everyday bird. The speaker seems to be looking up at this creature with real awe—and seeing, not just a marvel of nature, but a powerful consciousness. Perhaps the personification suggests the speaker is even imagining their way into that consciousness a little bit, feeling what it would be like to actually be the eagle.
The immediacy of this first line helps to evoke the speaker's wonder. The way the speaker launches right into this scene makes it feel as if the eagle has suddenly—and breathtakingly—caught their eye. Listen to the way the alliteration and consonance in this line help to set the scene:
He clasps the crag with crooked hands;
Those tough /c/ and /cr/ sounds are as rocky as the landscape they describe—and make the eagle's "crooked" talons feel like a natural part of the "crag." This bird is in its element.
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Lines 2-3
Close to the sun in lonely lands,
Ringed with the azure world, he stands.
Unlock all 436 words of this analysis of Lines 2-3 of “The Eagle,” and get the Line-by-Line Analysis for every poem we cover.
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Lines 4-5
The wrinkled sea beneath him crawls:
He watches from his mountain walls, -
Line 6
And like a thunderbolt he falls.
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“The Eagle” Symbols
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The Eagle
This poem's eagle could symbolize any number of things, from insight to inspiration to God. By vividly describing a highly symbolic bird, the poem opens up many avenues for such interpretations—without insisting that the reader choose any one in particular.
Eagles are traditional symbols of intellect, so there's the possibility that this poem describes what those qualities feel like: the eagle's power, his sharp eye, and his sudden dive might all evoke how it feels to think deeply and freely, and then hit on a new insight. For that matter, the eagle might symbolize the speaker's poetic inspiration—the feeling of being suddenly struck by the idea that leads one to write a poem like this!
And some readers have also seen the eagle as a symbol for God—an idea the speaker nods to through personification and "thunderbolt[s]." In this reading, the eagle's mastery of the world and sudden, lightning-quick descent might evoke the way that one version of God relates to creation: sitting watchfully above, then darting down to deal out ferocious judgment.
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“The Eagle” Poetic Devices & Figurative Language
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Personification
By personifying the eagle, the speaker gives it a mysterious, godlike mind of its own.
If readers didn't know this poem was about an eagle, they might not guess for a minute! The poem's first image is of an unknown "he" who grasps a "crag" in his "crooked hands." There's something strange about that picture: the reader might imagine either a gnarled old man clinging to the side of a cliff or a god holding that entire cliff in his hands. And both of those impressions linger even as the reader begins to get the idea. There's something of both the wise old man and the almighty god in this eagle. The fact that the sea below the bird is also personified as "craw[ling]" adds to the image of the eagle as the master of his domain, perched high above the lowly, subservient sea.
Presenting the eagle in the form of a person—a "he"—the speaker also suggests that the eagle has a consciousness: an identity of his own, and intentions of his own. The eagle doesn't appear as an unthinking, instinctive force of nature, but as an awe-inspiring character.
And perhaps this personification is a way for the speaker to identify with the eagle, sharing in its experience, feeling how it might feel to fall from a cliffside "like a thunderbolt," but with full human consciousness. A real live eagle, after all, doesn't ever seem to say "Wheeeee!"—but a human can feel the exhilaration of an eagle's flight just by imagining it from the ground.
Additionally, the p
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Parallelism
Unlock all 199 words of this analysis of Parallelism in “The Eagle,” and get the poetic device analyses for every poem we cover.
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Simile
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End-Stopped Line
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Imagery
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Alliteration
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Assonance
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“The Eagle” Vocabulary
Select any word below to get its definition in the context of the poem. The words are listed in the order in which they appear in the poem.
- Clasps
- Crag
- Crooked hands
- Azure
Clasps-
Grasps, holds tightly.
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Form, Meter, & Rhyme Scheme of “The Eagle”
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Form
"The Eagle" is broken into two tercets (three-line stanzas). In six sparing lines, it evokes a whole wide and dramatic landscape, full of craggy rocks and echoing seas, and a powerful, godlike central figure: an eagle as mighty as a "thunderbolt."
This poem was first published under the title "The Eagle: A Fragment." A fragment is a segment of a never-completed (or sometimes purely imaginary!) longer work, published as a stand-alone poem. Fragment poems often feel rather mysterious, hinting that there's a bigger story here just beyond a veil. (Coleridge's "Kubla Khan" is another good example.) The sense that a longer poem is only starting here makes this poem's brevity feel powerful, suggesting there's a whole unspoken world of meaning behind this one image.
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Meter
"The Eagle" uses iambic tetrameter: lines of four iambs, metrical feet with a da-DUM rhythm. Here's what that sounds like in line 1:
He clasps | the crag | with crook- | ed hands;
This steady, pounding rhythm evokes the poem's world of soaring cliffs and endless waves: this is a powerful meter to suit some powerful images.
The speaker also plays with this rhythm to evoke the eagle's behavior. Take a look at the way the meter works in lines 2 and 3:
Close to | the sun | in lone- | ly lands,
Ringed with | the az- | ure world, | he stands.Both of these lines start with a trochee—the opposite of an iamb, with a DUM-da rhythm. Those strong initial stresses give the first words of these lines a little extra oomph and create a swinging, sweeping, back-and-forth rhythm that mirrors the way the eagle scans the landscape for its prey.
When the speaker returns to straightforward iambic tetrameter in the second stanza, the change in meter matches the change in mood: as the eagle prepares to dive, the meter gets more focused and consistent, as if the bird's eye is now fixed firmly on the unsuspecting little furry creature below.
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Rhyme Scheme
"The Eagle" uses a striking, insistent rhyme scheme. Each of its tercets (or three-line stanzas) uses three rhymes in a row, like this:
AAA BBB
This is a pretty dramatic and unusual choice! And it only feels more noticeable because every one of these rhyme words is a strong monosyllable, falling like the blow of an axe: "hands," "stands," "lands," boom boom boom.
That forceful feeling makes perfect sense: this is a poem about a mighty eagle striking "like a thunderbolt," and these rhymes feel as powerful and swift as the eagle's fall.
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“The Eagle” Speaker
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The speaker of this poem is just an anonymous, awestruck voice—with no clear personality or identity beyond that awe. The speaker's whole role here is just to stare at this bird in wonder.
For that very reason, there's some sense that the speaker might be imagining the eagle, or even imagining what it might be like to be the eagle. The poem seems able to observe the eagle from right up close, in spite of the fact that the eagle is standing on a remote crag that seems almost to touch the sun, well out of human reach. And when the bird at last falls "like a thunderbolt" on the world below, there's a sense that the speaker feels swept up in its exhilarating power.
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“The Eagle” Setting
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"The Eagle" is set in grand, sweeping, wild, and mountainous terrain. Everything here is soaringly vast: the mountaintops seem to touch the sky, and the huge ocean is so far below that it looks like "wrinkled" fabric.
The eagle seems to be the absolute master of this domain: these are "his mountain walls," and these "lonely lands" don't seem to be inhabited by humankind. The setting thus makes the eagle himself seem even more awe-inspiring and powerful. He's the godlike ruler of an epic landscape, standing at the very center of his own "azure world."
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Literary and Historical Context of “The Eagle”
Literary Context
Alfred, Lord Tennyson (1809-1892) was one of the most famous, influential, and beloved poets of the Victorian era. In fact, he was so emphatically the face of mid-19th-century English poetry that he became Poet Laureate to Queen Victoria herself.
In some ways, Tennyson's poetry is transitional, marking the end of the earlier Romantic era as much as it establishes a new Victorian voice. The intensity and brevity of "The Eagle" (published in 1851) might, for instance, remind readers of Shelley's "Ozymandias"—and the mighty, awe-inspiring eagle itself feels like a cousin to Blake's "Tyger." Tennyson was well aware of his debt to the Romantics: he was a huge fan of Lord Byron as a young man and was deeply shocked by Byron's tragic death. He also directly inherited the title of Poet Laureate from arch-Romantic William Wordsworth.
But like his friends Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Tennyson was also an innovator and a master in his own right. The concise power of "The Eagle," for instance, demonstrates his knack for choosing just the right word.
While Tennyson fell out of popularity among the early-20th-century Modernists (who dismissed his work as too quaint, too pretty, and too conservative), recent scholars have given him more credit, praising his deep sense of mystery and wonder. There's no question that he's an important and influential writer: to this day, poems like "The Lady of Shalott," are among the best-known and best-loved in the world.
Historical Context
Tennyson wasn't just a popular poet during his time: he was a major public figure. As Poet Laureate to Queen Victoria, Tennyson was one face of the British Empire at its peak. Under Victoria, Britain's power expanded worldwide. Proverbially, the "sun never set on the British Empire": Britain had colonial holdings across the world, and very much saw itself as the rightful, "civilized" ruler of all the lands it had conquered.
Some of Tennyson's own work reflects the intense British patriotism of the time. His "The Charge of the Light Brigade," for instance, is a bombastic celebration of military self-sacrifice. But it's also a tragedy, and reflects another major Victorian preoccupation: grief.
Queen Victoria's beloved husband Prince Albert died when Tennyson was about a decade into his tenure as Poet Laureate. Victoria went into deep mourning for the rest of her life—and sparked a craze for flamboyant public grief. Victorian mourners would wear black for years, make elaborate wreaths and jewelry out of the hair of the dead, and pose corpses for post-mortem portraits. Tennyson himself might have helped to fan the flames of this obsession with his great poem "In Memoriam," a long commemoration of a beloved friend, dead too young.
Perhaps the Victorian obsession with death and mourning also speaks to the changing 19th-century world. As Europe's rural past began to fade, and the Industrial Revolution ushered in an era of rapid, dirty, and dangerous change, Britain embraced its new economic might—but also mourned a disappearing way of life.
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More “The Eagle” Resources
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External Resources
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Poems in Two Volumes — Learn more about Tennyson's Poems, the important collection in which this poem first appeared—and see images of a lavishly illustrated Victorian edition.
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The Poem Aloud — Listen to the poem read aloud.
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A Short Biography — Learn more about Tennyson's life and work at the British Library's website.
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Tennyson's Obituary — Read a contemporary account of Tennyson's death—and learn about how influential and important a poet he was in his own time.
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Tennyson Today — Read an article about Tennyson's continuing influence.
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LitCharts on Other Poems by Alfred Lord Tennyson
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