“does anyone know where the love of god goes / when the waves turn the minutes to hours?”

[larryhammer]

For Poetry Monday:

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.


Published 1830. Critics generally agree that a) this is best described as a variant-form sonnet of 15 lines and b) the kraken is likely symbolic of something, but they have no consensus on what that something might be.

---L.

Subject quote from The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald, Gordon Lightfoot.