April is Poetry Month: Day 23

https://www.greatbigcanvas.com/view/bald-eagle-perched-on-spruce
-branch-overlooking-the-chilkat-mountains-alaska,2116520/

The Eagle

He clasps the crag with crooked hands;

Close to the sun in lonely lands,

Ringed with the azure world, he stands.

The wrinkled sea beneath him crawls;

He watches from his mountain walls,

And like a thunderbolt he falls.

                        Alfred Lord Tennyson

From: The Bird Book, Compiled and edited by Richard Shaw, Warne, 1974.

    Chances are this poem by Tennyson sounds familiar to you.  It is short, yet powerful, and has an identifiable poetic structure; making it ideal for classroom study.  

    Back in the days when memorizing poetry was "a thing" I would have been happy to be assigned this poem and not something by Longfellow (whose poems like the Song of Hiawatha, were indeed long fellows!) 

    It is a two STANZA poem, written in three line groups or TERCETS.  The rhyming pattern is a simple AAA BBB and the rhythm or METRICAL PATTERN is an IAMBIC TETRAMETER. This means that each line contains four sets of two beats, known as METRICAL FEET or IAMBS.  The first is unstressed and the second is stressed. It sounds something like da-DUM, da-DUM.

    Lest you think that I am geekier than you already do,  I found this information on the Poem Analysis website.  This is a fantastic site if you want to look beneath the surface of a poem, and let's face it...there is often a whole hidden universe to be found within a poem's economy of words but wealth of meaning.  

    The Eagle, for example is only 41 words long, including the title, but those few words create a world and an experience. Reading this analysis helped me see how Tennyson was able to accomplish this.  

    This website is a happy discovery for me and I will return to learn more about the poems that confounds me.