'He clasps the crag with crooked hands...'

 I heard on the news today (even Radio 3 has some news bulletins, mercifully brief) that Golden Eagles are being seen in the far North of England, a hopeful sign that they might return to breed south of the border for the first time in many years. 
I still find Tennyson's short poem 'The Eagle' a thrilling piece of work, as I did in my boyhood – 

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;

He watches from his mountain walls,

And like a thunderbolt he falls.

Who could resist? The poem, described as 'A Fragment' but surely complete, has been subject to some fanciful interpretation over the years, with the eagle being seen as a metaphor for a corrupt ('crooked') man of power holding on to his position but doomed to fall, or even for the position of the Catholic church following the passing of the Ecclesiastical Titles Act (in the same year the poem was written). I'm quite happy to read it as an extraordinarily vivid and forceful poem about, er, an eagle – though not, as it happens, an English eagle, or even a Scottish one. It seems that Tennyson was inspired by memories of the eagles he saw circling overhead on his visits to the Pyrenees (where, as a young man, he had helped Arthur Hallam and others to deliver money and messages to the Spanish revolutionaries). The 'wrinkled sea' he invented, perhaps with the spectacular White-Tailed Sea Eagle in mind.
This was one of the poems that cemented my boyhood love of Tennyson, a love that has never quite left me.