“O’er the deep! o’er the deep! / Where the whale and the shark and the sword-fish sleep!”

[larryhammer]

For Poetry Monday, a 15-line variant sonnet:


The Kraken, Alfred the Tennyson

Below the thunders of the upper deep,
Far, far beneath in the abysmal sea,
His ancient, dreamless, uninvaded sleep
The Kraken sleepeth: faintest sunlights flee
About his shadowy sides; above him swell
Huge sponges of millennial growth and height;
And far away into the sickly light,
From many a wondrous grot and secret cell
Unnumbered and enormous polypi
Winnow with giant arms the slumbering green.
There hath he lain for ages, and will lie
Battening upon huge sea worms in his sleep,
Until the latter fire shall heat the deep;
Then once by man and angels to be seen,
In roaring he shall rise and on the surface die.


Even young Tennyson had a way with sounds. It took a while to temper the pomposity, though. And how to better land the ending (those last two lines need a little more development to really stick it -- either start using Revelations imagery earlier, right after the delayed volta, or give up the already creaking sonnet form and spin it out a few more lines).

---L.

Subject quote from .

Comments

[sovay]

And how to better land the ending

I like the first three lines and the last two best, honestly. The stuff in the middle works for me on the level of imagery, but not mostly (exception made for "faintest sunlights flee / About his shadowy sides" and "Battening upon huge sea worms in his sleep") in terms of sound and rhythm.

[larryhammer]

The last two lines are definitely good lines, but they are not well-supported by the poem up to then. (And I'm rather struck by the vowel progression of "Unnumbered and enormous polypi" even as that last word strikes me as a rather odd choice.)

[thistleingrey]

Did Tennyson ever learn to temper the pomposity? I taught his Arthurian thing twice alongside Morris's Defence of Guenevere, and it was the hardest part of the class, oddly, despite our reading translations from the 9th and 12th centuries plus part of T. H. White. I dunno.

[larryhammer]

His Arthurian thing doesn't show him at his best (and is rather uneven to boot). Try In Memoriam for generally non-pompous.

That sounds like a fun range of selections, despite that.

[thistleingrey]

I bounced off In Memoriam, though I agree that it's stronger poetically.

Some of the students liked it, which isn't bad considering that some had signed up only because it satisfied a graduation requirement....

[larryhammer]

I have to be in the exact right mood for In Memoriam.

[thistleingrey]

hmm, maybe I should try again (though maybe not exactly right now, yet).

[larryhammer]

(Possibly not.)

It also occurs to me that mature T tends to be less pompous when writing in tight constraints, such as smaller lyrics (which encompasses the assemblage that is IM).