Flower and Eagle

Two short and potent poems by Alfred, Lord Tennyson (1809-1892):



FLOWER IN THE CRANNIED WALL

Flower in the crannied wall,
I pluck you out of the crannies; –
Hold you here, root and all, in my hand,
Little flower – but if I could understand
What you are, root and all, and all in all,
I should know what God and man is.


I once read that this poem sums up the main difference between the Western mind and the Eastern mind. Tennyson, obviously an example of the Western point of view near its fullest, observes a flower that catches his eye. It could be the most beautiful and vivid specimen he’s ever beheld or something simple and commonplace as a dandelion; he doesn’t say. Put he plucks it out, studies it, contemplates such a wondrous thing, a thing created and alive, revealing his own inabilities. How can he understand the anything if he can’t even know what this flower is? But he does intuit a glimpse of the Almighty in that little flower. Such is the Western analytical mind in motion and in contemplation. The Eastern mind, it is argued, would see the flower, come to similar conclusions, but – would not pluck it from the wall.



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.


Couple of things fly out at us here. There’s Tennyson’s vibrant choice of words: crag, ringed, azure, wrinkled, crawls, thunderbolt. Notice the alliteration with the hard-c’s. Then we have the two-syllable adjective and one-syllable noun pairs: crooked hands, lonely lands, azure world, wrinkled sea, mountain walls. In fact, the only word longer than two syllables is thunderbolt – how that calls out for our attention. There’s also the tension between passivity in the first stanza and activity in the second. Oh, the sheer power of that final line. But think of this as a slight twist to this denouement – perhaps, just perhaps, our magnificent creature is not falling the hundreds of feet landward to pounce on unsuspecting prey. Perhaps he himself is the prey, a victim, possibly, of the hunter’s aim? Sacrilege, no?