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Home  »  A Library of American Literature  »  The Eagle’s Fall

Stedman and Hutchinson, comps. A Library of American Literature:
An Anthology in Eleven Volumes. 1891.
Vols. IX–XI: Literature of the Republic, Part IV., 1861–1889

The Eagle’s Fall

By Charles Goodrich Whiting (1842–1922)

[Born in St. Albans, Vt., 1842. Died in Otis, Mass., 1922. From The Saunterer. 1886.]

THE EAGLE, did ye see him fall?

Aflight beyond mid-air

Erewhile his mighty pinions bore him,

His eyry left, the sun before him;

And not a bird could dare

To match with that tremendous motion,

Through fire and flood, ’twixt sky and ocean,—

But did ye see the eagle fall?

And so ye saw the eagle fall!

Struck in his flight of pride

He hung in air one lightning moment,

As wondering what the deadly blow meant,

And what his blood’s ebb-tide.

Whirling off sailed a loosened feather;

Then headlong, pride and flight together,—

’Twas thus ye saw the eagle fall!

Thus did ye see the eagle fall!

But on the sedgy plain,

Where closed the monarch’s eye in dying,

Marked ye the screaming and the vying

Wherewith the feathered train,

Sparrow and jackdaw, hawk and vulture,

Gathered exulting to insult your

Great eagle in his fall?