Eagle

We spent my entire Textual Studies class talking about the following Tennyson poem in class today and discussing what the poem meant to us. Al, is it okay if I reprint the poem? And he says nothing because he's dead, so here goes:

THE EAGLE

FRAGMENT

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,
And like a thunderbolt he falls.

I really don't like this poem. In class I compared it to a bathroom stall limerick; something that you will read, smile at, and then forget when you walk out the door. We were asked how we related to the poem and how we interpreted it. I said that I thought that there were undertones of death in the poem, but that I had no access to it because it seems to be very much about an eagle. I've been thinking about it for almost 2 hours now, and I still think that it is very much about an eagle. The eagle itself can symbolize many, many things for people, but in the end, if you don't care about eagles, you don't care about this poem. I'm interested to hear some of your interpretations, as I'm becoming more convinced that this is just a bad poem. Not necessarily a bad poem, but a simple elementary school type of poem.