In Alfred, Lord Tennyson's poem 'The Eagle' what type of figurative language is being used when he says,

Question

In Alfred, Lord Tennyson's poem 'The Eagle' what type of figurative language is being used when he says, "The wrinkled sea beneath him..." and, "Ringed with the azure of the world..."?

Answer 1

The line "The wrinkled sea" could be considered "synaesthesia," where visual and tactile metaphors overlap. In other words, the word "wrinkled" invokes both the sense of sight and the sense of touch.

To clarify what I mean by synaesthesia, another example could be found in the term "loud shirt." When we say someone has a loud shirt, we don't literally mean the shirt is being noisy, but that its patterns and/or colors are overly ostentatious. The metaphor of sound has crossed over in the the visual of the shirt's appearance.

Moving on, when we look at the entire line, "The wrinkled sea beneath him crawls, we see the use of "personification," where an abstract concept or an inanimate object is given human-like qualities. In this case, the sea is made to seem like it is crawling, almost in subservience to the perched eagle.

"Ringed with the azure world" is a more general metaphor where the sky is being compared to a blue (azure) world that surrounds the eagle.

Answer 2

Poem:

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, 5
And like a thunderbolt he falls.
**
The words “clasps,” “crag,” and “crooked” associate the eagle with age: “craggy,” for instance, is still used to describe a lined, age-weathered face. The hard “c” sound that begins each of these words also establishes a hard, sharp tenor to this poem’s tone that fits in with the idea of the eagle’s similarly hard, sharp life. The repetition of first sounds is called alliteration, and Tennyson uses it in this short “fragment” to convey a sense of the eagle’s situation.

Theme: Freedom.

The bird soaring in the sky has always been used as an example of freedom from the bonds of gravity, which anchors plants, people, and most animals to the earth. The eagle in this poem is pictured “close to the sun”—another symbol of highflying freedom that is not controlled by the limitations of the earth’s atmosphere. This area of the sky, just inside of and barely contained by the “azure world” of outer space, is what is meant by “lonely lands.” Loneliness implies detachment or a lack of responsibility to any other thing.

good luck

Answer 3

“He clasps the crag with crooked hands