کتاب Mastering Poetry | مسترینگ پوئتری

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The Eagle

He clasps the crag with crooked hands;

Close to the sun in lonely lands,

Ring with the azure world, he stands.

The wrinkled sea beneath him crawls;

He watches from his mountain walls,

And like a thunderbolt he falls.

Commentary

The content of Elizabeth Barrett Browning sonnet is a traditional focus for literature of all kinds – not just poetry. Her treatment of love is personal and she attempts to qualify the extent of her feelings for her lover, Robert Browning. Where the meaning of Barrett Browning’s sonnet is literal, Tennyson’s treatment of the eagle can be seen as both literal and symbolic. He is writing of a bird and its mastery of its environment, but also, perhaps, symbolically of a human ruler who conquers and reigns supreme in his kingdom. The opening simple clause creates an immediate and dramatic image, but we are dependent on the anaphoric reference back to the eagle of the title to understand the significance of the pronoun He(1.1). This ambiguity of reference underpins the reader’s feeling that the poem is doing more than literally describing a bird.