In six lines, Tennyson paints a complete and vivid picture of a bird of prey.
ByLord Tennyson1809-1892
Lord Tennyson1809-1892
Serving as Poet Laureate during much of Queen Victoria’s reign, Tennyson remains one of Britain’s most popular poets. His musical verse, rich imagery, and mastery of poetic structure captured the anxieties and ideals of the era. Works such as The Charge of the Light Brigade, Ulysses, and In Memoriam A.H.H. defined Victorian literary culture.
Main Text
Read this little poem out aloud, carefully, but not heavily. It has just six lines: J. H. Fowler headed them ‘Fragment’, but they are wonderfully evocative, and Tennyson would only have diminished their impact had he tried to go on.
He claspsHe clasps the crag with crooked hands; Close to the sun in lonely lands, Ring’d with the azure world, he stands. The wrinkled sea beneath him crawls; He watches from his mountain walls, And like a thunderbolt he falls.
Think and Speak
From a ’Fifties Classroom
For each word below, suggest words or phrases with a similar meaning.
Clasp
Wrinkle
Crawl
Fall
Watch
Suggestions
cling, clutch, grasp, grip
crease, ripple
creep
drop, swoop
look, observe
For the Writer In You
Don’t Give In to Tabloid Thinking
A public man who shows by his speeches
that he applies tabloid thinking to international affairs (by, for example, referring to the Government of another nation as a ‘group of murderers’) should be deprived of his office and given an occupation in which tabloid thinking would be more useful. He might, for example, find a congenial field of usefulness as a cheer-leader in an American University ball game.
Robert Thouless, Straight and Crooked Thinking (1930)
