Image via Wikipedia
The Eagle
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.
The Bard on the Hill 
This is a wonderfully compact and polished poem, and also ideal for a starting point for young poetry lovers. Have you seen the marvelous little video of a young boy reciting this one on YouTube? I think you’ll approve. This is a case of great parenting leading to sweet love of literacy!
It is a beautiful poem, complete in its way, though it was called a fragment in my source. Thanks for posting the link of the little boy reciting it. He did especially well with the second stanza, and put a wonderful emphasis into the part most striking to me, “like a thunderbolt he falls”.
A beautiful poem and an awesome photo! 🙂
Surprise! I really like this. I read a piece by the editor of an online poetry magazine where he said that if he reads a submitted poem with “azure” in it he immediately stops reading it. The poetry establishment is crammed full of ignorant snobby self appointed experts.
One way to know that you’ve got good taste is to go against modern poetry and modern critics. You’re right about the snobbery. One WordPress poet made a derogatory remark on some blog about rhyming couplets. After that, I started watching to see how many of the great poems have that kind of rhyme and many do. When they become more popular than the great poets and poems of old (I don’t know that many new ones), THEN they have room to talk. But they never will. I’ve written a rant about “prose poetry” (an oxymoron) that I’ll post later this evening (probably 3 or 4 hours from now).