Monday, May 19, 2014

What are romantic features of the poem "The Eagle?" Show how nature is in direct combination with the poet.

I think the main Romantic trait in "The Eagle" is the way Tennyson's imagery is meant to evoke the sublime. Edmund Burke connected the sublime to strong emotional responses -- beholding the sublime evoked in the viewer strong feelings of awe, terror, or dread. Nature, of course, was the greatest source of the sublime.

Tennyson's poem is extremely visual. His viewpoint, as poet, is to share the eagle's perch. Through the poet, we experience the awesome height: we can see how "his crooked hands" grasp the rock of the cliff; we are so high we are "close to the sun." It is as if the eagle and the wide blue horizon of the earth are one ("Ring'd with the azure world, he stands").


In the second stanza, awe turns to dread or exhilaration, as Tennyson contrasts the extreme height of the eagle ("The wrinkled sea beneath him crawls") with the incredible speed and power of his sudden dive ("like a thunderbolt he falls"). There is a sense that when the eagle falls, the reader falls with it -- that we share in the sublime power of the eagle.

No comments:

Post a Comment

Is Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre a feminist novel?

Feminism advocates that social, political, and all other rights should be equal between men and women. Bronte's Jane Eyre discusses many...