“An essay is a glass of water. But if a few drops of that water fall on a hot frying pan and sizzle? Then you have a poem.”~The Anthologist by Nicholson Baker

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.

I could write an essay on the eagle, a textbook on the care and feeding of eagles, take a photograph of an eagle, write a novel about eagles and eagle-lovers, but would I really have said anything more worthy about The Eagle than this poem says? Tennyson called it a “a fragment” since he was used to writing much longer poems. It’s certainly a memorable fragment.