This essay compares Ted Hughes' "Hawk Roosting" and Alfred Lord Tennyson's "The Eagle," examining how both poems use the image of a solitary bird of prey to explore the dual nature of the natural world. The analysis identifies key similarities in the poems' structure and imagery, focusing on how each poet establishes an initial scene of stillness and dominance before shifting to sudden, violent action. By tracing these parallel trajectories, the essay argues that both Hughes and Tennyson use their respective birds to capture the contradictions and paradoxes inherent in nature — its capacity for serene stillness and explosive force.
This paper demonstrates effective comparative close reading. Rather than treating each poem in isolation, the student identifies a shared structural trajectory (tranquility shifting to violent action) and uses parallel quotations from both texts to build a single, unified argument. This technique shows how literary comparison works at its best — not simply listing similarities, but using them to illuminate a deeper shared theme.
The essay follows a four-part structure: an introduction establishing the thesis, a body paragraph analyzing shared imagery of the bird's position between earth and sky, a second body paragraph examining the shift from stillness to action in both poems, and a conclusion that synthesizes the argument. Each section advances the central claim without digression, making this a model of concise comparative literary analysis.
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 through their unique perspective. Although each poem is written from a slightly different vantage point, both nonetheless celebrate the view the bird of prey holds of the world and the serenity that seemingly stems from this position. 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 — a creature 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 states 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 paint the image of their respective birds, both poets also note — beyond the birds' hands — each bird's position between the sun and the 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 is important because, after establishing the initial image of the bird and its position midway between earth and sky, both poems quickly shift from images of still tranquility into violent action.
Alfred Lord Tennyson and Ted Hughes both attempt to describe the alternately peaceful and chaotic characteristics of nature by describing a bird of prey in their poems. While Tennyson describes an eagle and Hughes describes a hawk, both poems ultimately follow a similar trajectory, with the solitary bird surveying its realm before exploding in a flurry of action. In Hughes' poem the bird flies upward and ruminates on its violent energy, while in Tennyson's poem the bird drops like an elemental force into the sea; in both cases, the nature poem uses the image of the alternately still and forcefully moving bird to paint a picture of the natural world that manages to capture some of the contradictions and paradoxes inherent within it.
Hughes, Ted. "Hawk Roosting." In Schmidt, Michael, ed. Eleven British Poets. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980. 171–172. Print.
Lord Tennyson, Alfred. "The Eagle." Poetry Foundation. Web. 20 Nov 2011. <http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poem/174589>.
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