An Eagle-a Vietnamese Poem explicated

An Eagle

By the Vietnamese Poet Mai Van Phan

Translated into English by

Pompen Hantrakool

Explicated by Dr Ramesh Chandra Mukhopadhyaya

The Text

Flying up high

Increasing in confidence

The Earth is a dewdrop

As the title of the poem shows the poem dwells on the eagle. Just as the lion is the king of the forests so is the eagle king of the skies.It is the symbol of power and strength. It is associated with Zeus of Greece Jupiter of Rome and Odin of Scandinavia and so on.It is hope on God as per the Bible. It is incarnation of Saint John the evangelist.In ancient Egypt it is the falcon that is associated with Horus.The eagle has been the emblem of many a monarch of ancient Rome and medieval France. Napoleon also used it. With the resurrection in modern times Egypt chose  the emblem of an eagle. Well here in this poem the eagle flies high.He must have taken off from the earth. Why? May be he was tired of the earthiness of earth. Or else from the empyrean height he must take a birds eye view of the earth. He must look upon the earth steadily and as a whole.The higher he goes he is more and more confident. Because he is the lord of the skies. Because the skies and the void are his domain ;the skies and the void are the source of his energy.Once  sure of his strength

He looks upon the earth from the empyrean height and lo! The earth looks like  a dewdrop.When we are on earth the earth seems to be strong and stable. On the surface the earth stands for her solid substances like stone that are resistant to change.

But when we look upon  the earth from cosmic or  aerial heights  what  seemed to us as solid and hard and resistant  to change  turns into dewdrop  suspended or floating in the void.This clearly points out how the change of perspective effects a change in the meaning. The same poem therefore could be explicated in one way by Vietnamese culture and in another way by Indian culture. There is an aesthetics lurking here. But this is not all. The eagle could stand for the soul of the poet flying higher still and higher in the blue deep.From the earth, it might look like a cloud of fire to us whose race is just

begun. And from the skies the soul might look upon the earth as something impermanent as short lived as a  dewdrop. Everything in this earth is in a flux just as the waves in a stream.

Thus the poet and the eagle are seers in this poem