No You Be A Lone Eagle - Analysis

Refusing the romance of flight

This poem’s central move is a comic but serious refusal: the speaker rejects the cultural glamour of aviation and insists that the so-called lone eagle is less noble than reckless. From the opening pun—being fair-minded versus air-minded—Nash frames flying as a kind of mental defect: not merely a hobby, but a way of thinking that floats away from consequences. The speaker isn’t neutral; he is proudly biased toward the ground, and he builds that bias by making flight feel less like freedom than like an argument against common sense.

Up into the sun, down onto the cranium

The poem keeps yanking the reader between altitude and impact. It mocks the ecstatic pitch of aviation—soaring up up up—by immediately imagining the likely ending: unsoar down down down onto an invaluable cranium. That word invaluable is doing real work: the joke lands because the skull is priceless, while the thrill of up up up suddenly seems cheap. Even the goofy comparison—fresh cool orchid versus paper geranium—tilts the odds toward disaster; the speaker’s point is that the supposed beauty of flight is fragile, decorative, and easily crushed.

Answering the hymns of progress (and puncturing them)

Nash then turns to the slogans people use to sell flying: it’s safer up in God's trafficless heaven than in a car or train; it gets you to Boston faster than you can say antidis-establishmentarianism; disliking planes is antiquarianism. The speaker’s tactic is to quote these claims long enough for them to sound self-satisfied, then interrupt them with a blunt, almost exasperated But ... My God. That ellipsis and outburst mark the poem’s main tonal shift: it moves from playful wordplay into a kind of impatient realism. He doesn’t counter with statistics; he counters with the body and with fear, as if the whole debate should end the moment you picture what falling means.

Where you arrive: South Station or the “daily press”

The Boston example becomes a sharp test of what counts as a good outcome. On a train, he says, he has a good chance of landing in South Station, not in the section of the daily press reserved for victims of aviation. The humor is grim: he translates the language of travel (landing) into the language of catastrophe (becoming newsprint). That’s the poem’s key tension: the culture praises speed and modernity, but the speaker values predictability—arriving as a person rather than as a headline. “Good chance” is also telling; he doesn’t pretend trains are perfect, just that their failures don’t feel as mythic and final as gravity’s verdict.

Comfort, nausea, and the “law of gravity”

Even the promise of comfort gets dragged back to physical reality. If planes are terribly comfortable, why, the speaker asks, must you carry a paper bag just in case? The joke implies that flight requires you to anticipate your own bodily rebellion. And then comes the poem’s most serious claim, delivered as mock-moral philosophy: no kind of depravity brings such speedy retribution as ignoring the law of gravity. Calling it depravity is exaggerated, but it clarifies his worldview: trying to outsmart gravity isn’t daring; it’s a quick way to be punished. The poem’s comedy keeps circling one sober conviction—that nature’s rules are stricter than human optimism.

The final oath against the Wright brothers

The closing wish—that the Wright brothers had chosen silver fox farming or tree surgery—caps the argument by pretending aviation was just an unfortunate career choice that could have been avoided. It’s absurd, but it also reveals the speaker’s deeper desire: not merely to avoid flying personally, but to roll history back to a world where this temptation didn’t exist. By calling his wish not perjury, he frames himself as a sworn witness for the prosecution—testifying that the romance of flight is mostly a sales pitch, and that the ground, with all its slowness and plainness, is where human life actually has a future.