Hawk Roosting and Eagle Alfred Lord Tennyson\'s

¶ … Hawk Roosting" and "Eagle"

Alfred Lord Tennyson's "The Eagle" and Ted Hughes' "Hawk Roosting" both reflect on the relationship between birds of prey and the rest of the world due to their unique perspective, and although either poem is written from a slightly different perspective, they both nonetheless celebrate the view the bird of prey has of the world, and the serenity which seemingly stems from this. By examining the similarities between the two poems, one is able to see how Hughes' and Tennyson's views of nature coincide in the form of the solitary, stoic bird of prey that seemingly embodies the dual peace and chaos of the natural world.

The first crucial similarity to note about both poems is that in many ways, they describe the same image from slightly different perspectives. Tennyson's poem describes an eagle roosting as "he clasps the crag with crooked hands," whereas Hughes' narrator is the bird itself, and so directly mentions how he is sitting "in the top of the wood, my eyes closed" and with "hooked feet" that "are locked upon the rough bark" (Tennyson 1, Hughes 1, 3, 9). Both poets begin with the image of a solitary bird surveying its territory, and by focusing on the birds' hands, the poets give the impression of a kind of timelessness achieved by the animals through the strength of their grip. As Tennyson and Hughes are painting the image of their respective birds, aside from their hands both poets note the position of the bird between the sun and earth. Hughes' hawk remarks that "the air's buoyancy and the sun's rays / are of advantage to me; / and the earth's face upward for my inspection," while Tennyson describes the eagle as "close to the sun in lonely lands, / ring'd with the azure world" (Hughes 5-8, Tennyson 2-3). In both cases, the effect is to create a kind of division between the earth and sky, with the roosting bird of prey occupying this line. This division between the earth and the space above is important, because after setting up the initial image of the bird of prey and its position midway between earth and sky, both poems quickly shift from the images of still tranquility into violent action.

Tennyson and Hughes both shift abruptly from describing a motionless bird to noting its dramatic and rapid action, and in doing so they round out their images of nature by highlighting the violent dynamism which underlies the ostensibly peaceful environment. In Hughes' poem, the hawk takes to the sky, where he claims to "kill where I please because it is all mine" and that "the one path of my flight is direct / through the bones of the living" (Hughes 14, 18-19). The aforementioned strength and stoicism represented through the hawk's hands is supported by this almost terrifying violence, and the poem serves to demonstrate how in nature, tranquility is often only the brief respite in between bouts of violence and movement. Tennyson's poem seems to be suggesting this same thing, but does so in a slightly different way. In this case, Tennyson uses the rest of nature to demonstrate its violence and chaos, and thus locates the eagle alongside other more elemental forces. Tennyson describes how "the wrinkled sea beneath him crawls; he watches from his mountain walls, and like a thunderbolt he falls" (Tennyson 4-6). The eagle dives into the elemental force of the "wrinkled sea" with his own elemental power in the form of a thunderbolt, so that the eagle's initial tranquility is demonstrated to merely be one side of nature's overwhelming and awesome power.