summary of the dying eagle by E.J.Pratt
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The Dying Eagle
E. J. Pratt (1883 - 1964)
A light had gone out from his vanquished eyes; His head was cupped within the hunch of his shoulders; His feathers were dull and bedraggled; the tips Of his wings sprawled down to the edge of his tail. He was old, yet it was not his age Which made him roost on the crags Like a rain-drenched raven On the branch of an oak in November. Nor was it the night, for there was an hour To go before sunset. An iron had entered His soul which bereft him of pride and realm, Had struck him today; for up to noon That crag had been his throne. Space was his empire, bounded only By forest and sky and the flowing horizons. He had outfought, outlived all his rivals, And the eagles that now were poised over glaciers Or charting the coastal outlines of clouds Were his by descent: they had been tumbled Out of their rocky nests by his mate, In the first trial of their fledgeling spins. Only this morning the eyes of the monarch Were held in arrest by a silver flash Shining between two peaks of the ranges- A sight which galvanized his back, Bristled the feathers on his neck, And shot little runnels of dust where his talons Dug recesses in the granite. Partridge? Heron? Falcon? Eagle? Game or foe? He would reconnoitre.
Catapulting from the ledge, He flew at first with rapid beat, Level, direct: then with his grasp Of spiral strategy in fight, He climbed the orbit With swift and easy undulations, And reach positions where he might Survey the bird - for bird it was; But such a bird as never flew Between the heavens and the earth Since pterodactyls, long before The birth of condors, learned to kill And drag their carrion up the Andes.
The eagle stared at the invader Marked the strange bat-like shadow moving In leagues over the roofs of the world, Across the passes and moraines, Darkening the vitriol blue of the mountain lakes. Was it a flying dragon? Head, Body and wings, a tail fan-spread And taut like his own before the strike; And there in front two whirling eyes That took unshuttered The full blaze of the meridian. The eagle never yet had known
A rival he would not grapple, But something in this fellow's length Of back, his plated glistening shoulders, Had given him pause. And did that thunder Somewhere in his throat not argue Lightning in his claws? And then The speed - was it not double his own? But what disturbed him most, angered And disgraced him was the unconcern With which this supercilious bird Cut through the aquiline dominion, Snubbing the ancient suzerain With extra-territorial insolence, And disappeared.
So evening found him on the crags again, This time with sloven shoulders And nerveless claws. Dusk had outridden the sunset by an hour To haunt his unhorizoned eyes. And soon his flock flushed with the chase Would be returning, threading their glorious curves Up through the crimson archipelagoes Only to find him there - Deaf to the mighty symphony of wings, And brooding Over the lost empire of the peaks.