Analisi testuale poesia

ANALISI TESTUALE POESIA

TITLE OF POEM: "The eagle".

DATE: 1851.

AUTHOR: Alfred Tennyson ( 6^th August 1809, 6^th October 1892) was born n Somersby, Lincolnshire, fourth of twelve children of George and Elizabeth Tennyson.

Alfred Tennyson was a poet laureate of the United Kingdom, during the reign of Queen Victoria ( 24^th May 1819, 22^th January 1901) and he is one of the most popular English poets.

Queen Victoria was an ardent admirer of Tennyson's work and in 1884 created him Baron Tennyson.

STYLE: This poem is written in two stanzas of three lines each and all the six lines are iambic tetrameters.

A iambic foot is structured in units of two syllables were the first syllable is unstressed and the second is stressed.

A tetrameter is a particular type of line formed by four feet.

In the second and in the third line we can see that the author varies the metrical scheme, in fact the first two feet, at the beginning of the mentioned lines, aren't iambic but trochaic.

In his poem, Alfred Tennyson, uses some figure of speech and some figure of thought: in the first and in the second lines "clasps, crag, crooked, close" is an alliteration, in the third line "azure world" and in the fifth line "mountain wall" are metaphor and finally we have a simily between "the eagle" and "thunderbolt" in the sixth line.

THEMES: In the past the eagle was the symbol of the Roman Empire and with this poem, were the main subject is exactly the eagle, Alfred Tennyson, want to make a comparison between the Roman and the British Empire.

As a matter of fact, the author, with this comparison want to celebrate the splendor and the power of his country's Empire that was, in the second half of the 19^th century, the biggest and the strongest in all the world.