Q: Comparative analysis of the poems The Eagle by Lord Alfred Tennyson and The

Oxen by Thomas Hardy?

Style is a distinctive way of using language to convey the intended meaning in appropriate
manner and stylistics is the study of the distinctive expression of language.
Alfred Lord Tennyson (1809-1892), a representative poet of the Victorian Era, is very
careful to present his poem that contains rhythm, rhyme, alliteration and figures of speech.
His poetry is usually revised and drafted. His verse is highly musical. His poetry shows
exquisite language and poetic skills. His language represents all that is elegant and musical in
the art of versification. 
“The Eagle” is one of Tennyson’s shortest lyric poems, probably the shortest of his famous
poems. It was written in1813 during the trip through the French Pyrenees, but it was
published twenty years later in the seventh edition of his poems. The poem represents
a major theme which is the image of power and how superiority can dominate inferiority.
This poem can be treated as a descriptive poem or as a symbolic poem. If we treat it as a
descriptive poem, it will describe the power, courage, and strength of the eagle

The poem “The Eagle” consists of two stanzas. The first stanza consists of three lines of
regular length. All the verse lines retain eight words. It means each verse line is
octasyllabic. The second stanza consists of three poetic lines having eight words in each
line.

Tennyson, one of the best poets in Britain, is a poet known for his ability to sense and hear
the music of words. The first feature that strikes us in this poem is his employment of
sounds. He uses some sound devices to represent the perfect and mighty image of the eagle.
Rhyme is one of the most popular sound devices of poetry. Rhyme, in general, is the
recurrence of the identical vowel sound followed by the same consonant sound in the
words that begin with different consonant sounds. This brief poem with two stanzas retains
the masculine end rhyme. The rhyme scheme of the poem is aaa bbb. It creates a sense of
harmony and power. Each stanza of this poem is triplet. The rhyming words are “hands /
lands /stands” in the first stanza and “crawls / walls / falls” in the second stanza.

Alliteration is a sound device which involves the repetition of the same consonant sound.
There is an alliteration of the sound in "clasp", "crag" and "crooked” that create a strong
onomatopoeic effect in the first verse line. It is a consonant to show the power and
domination of the eagle. There is an alliteration of l sound in "lonely / lands" in the second
line that shows the superiority and uniqueness of the authority.  
Symbol is an object, animate or inanimate, which represents or stands for something else
“The Eagle” by Tennyson is a symbolic poem in which he considers the eagle as a symbol
of a powerful, strong and courageous person, and the sea as a symbol of a person who is
demure, weak and scared. The eagle can be a symbol of a powerful, affluent and
developed country which can stand alone but retains the power, capacity, skills and
weapons to dominate other countries which are weak, poor and underdeveloped.
Metaphor is a figure of speech in which two unlike objects are implicitly compared without
the use of like or as. The speaker employs submerged metaphor “Mountain walls” to mean
the readers that mountains are walls for the eagle. Such walls are very high beyond the
reach of ordinary creatures.
This symbolic poem is full of visual images that can be seen by the mind eye. The “eagle” is
a major a visual image.
“Crag”, “sun”, “Crooked hands”, “azure world”, “stands”, “wrinkled sea”, “mountain
walls” and “thunderbolt” are visual images. “Crawls” and “falls” are both visual and
kinaesthetic images. “Crawls” suggests a slow speed of the sea, while “falls” tells us about
a very high speed of the eagle. All these images reflect the power, strength, highspeed and
harshness of the eagle.
 In this poem, the eagle is personified more than once by giving him human qualities which
make him seem even more majestic, powerful and awe-inspiring like a powerful person.
“Crooked hands”, “he stands”, “he falls”, and “he watches” provide the eagle with human
characteristics of standing, falling and watching. It is a personification as birds don’t have
hand, but they mean claws, so he makes the eagle as a person. The sea is also personified as
a weak or feeble person or a baby, crawling on hands and knees to indicate the lower,
inferior position of sea in comparison with the eagle.
The poem “the Eagle” by Tennyson is a symbolic brief poem that can be explained,
interpreted and analysed from diverse perspectives. Explicitly, the poem is about an eagle and
its power, its cruelty and its domination on ordinary creatures. Implicitly, the poem might be
about a powerful, affluent and dominating nation or person in the world. This poem sounds
perfect from the stylistic point of view.

“The Oxen” is a poem by the English novelist and poet Thomas Hardy. It relates to a
West Country legend: that, on the anniversary of Christ’s Nativity, each Christmas Day,
farm animals kneel in their stalls in homage.
In 'The Oxen' the poet looks back regretfully to his boyhood days when he believed in
miracles and was charmed by the naive folk belief in the kneeling of the oxen.  The
dominant feeling of "The Oxen" is one of wistful regret or poignant loss at the passing of
a secure world buttressed by the allied senses of legend, tradition, faith in presiding deity,
and community.
The poem The Oxen opens with the first two stanzas referring to the childhood memory,
and Hardy uses words like “flock” to create the rural atmosphere.  The words “meek mild
creatures” are not only descriptive of sleepy, warm cows gently chewing the cud in their
“strawy pen” but are also reminiscent of Charles Wesley’s children’s hymn. There is a
tendency among young children to believe what they are told, hence the final two lines of the
second stanza. The third and fourth stanzas take the reader forward to the present with the
poet considering the contemporary views of himself and others. Hardy still had some belief
in the supernatural elements as seen through the use of spirits and ghosts but by the time of
writing “Oxen,” he had abandoned all traditional Christian beliefs.

He, therefore, states that, although he no longer swallows the story without question, in the
way that he did as a child, he would not dismiss it out of hand now that he is an old man.

The speaker uses various techniques to develop the central mood of the poem.  By
including descriptions of a farm and creating the warmth of the "embers in hearthside
ease", Hardy begins to establish a setting of simplistic comfort.  The poet uses the
technique of allusion by ‘Now they are all on their knees,’
The legend about the cattle keeling to Jesus.
IT IS A MYTH
 The birth of Jesus Christ was presided over by a flock of cattle: oxen, donkeys, and
descendants of others beasts at Bethlehem.
 They knelt together at the stable of Bethlehem in reverence as soon as the infant
Christ was delivered.
The speaker says in the last line of the poem:
“In the lonely barton by yonder coomb

Our childhood used to know,”

I should go with him in the gloom,

meaning that he knew that it was a myth although he hopes that it is real, and that indicates
two things, one of which is how the speaker is obsessed with the past strengthening the
idea of nostalgia, and two is that how much he had believed in this story in the past.

The speaker uses the symbolism of The Oxen to represent the Childhood and the
memories of childhood.
The use of “they” at the beginning of the poem and the word I pronoun indicating that when
he was a child “they” have the control of thinking. The elderly people were the ones who
convinced the speaker of the story and there is no “I” in there indicating that he was
controlled and lead by them.
The word “flock” supports the last point where these words mean sheep symbolizing that
they are led by the elderly who are the shepherds. At the end of the poem, the use of the
pronoun “I” as if the speaker is telling us that he is no longer lead by anyone, he is the one
who takes his decisions by imposing the pronoun “I”.
The use of Alliteration in the lines ‘So fair a fancy few would weave/ In these years!’
The exclamation suggests an excitement often felt on Christmas Eve. It appears as if Hardy
gasps for breath like a child.
In the lonely barton by yonder coomb\Our childhood used to know’.
Here, through the enjambment it appears as if Hardy’s words are running on, just as the
children flocked to see the oxen.  The touching final two lines are emotive in their simplicity:
‘I should go with him in the gloom’.
Here, the emotive tense suggests a certain eagerness to experience the magic of childhood
belief once more, perhaps out of the ‘gloom’ of his adult state. Hardy confesses that he would
be ‘Hoping it might be so’ which supports this idea. One gets the sense that the persona is
aware that oxen do not kneel down in honor of Christ’s birth; age has taught him this we
could assume due to the nostalgic tone of the poem.
However, Hardy leaves the reader with the resounding verb ‘hoping’, a verb so full with
promise. Additionally, the butterflies in belly connotations of ‘might’ insight a similar giddy
excitement that the younger narrator experienced.