Saturday Rave: The Eagle, by Alfred, Lord Tennyson.

The most effective punches, I am told, don't travel very far. It's sometimes the same with writing.

(It does help if you're a poet of genius, of course.)

Alfred, Lord Tennyson...he didn't have a real middle name as far as I know, the Lord bit was a title he was pestered into accepting by the novelist Benjamin Disraeli, who was moonlighting as Prime Minister of Britain at the time...was born the son of a country clergyman just rich enough to have summer holidays in Skegness (which really isn't very rich at all). His father died when Alfred was at university at Cambridge, so Alfred had to leave without taking his degree. He had many years of struggling, but in the end he became poet laureate and very famous (and could only visit his house on the Isle of Wight in the winter because he kept being bothered by tourists).

Here's a very short, very clever, poem. It hangs around for ages doing nothing - and then it pounces.

There's much to admire, but how clever it is that at the start the reader is placed below the eagle, in the position of its prey.

As a poem, it's quite simply a knock-out.

He 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;
The watches from his mountain walls,
And like a thunderbolt he falls.

Word To Use Today: eagle. This word comes from the Old French aigle, from the Old Provençal aigla, from the Latin aquila, a word which might have something to do with aquilus, which means dark.