“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.

Comments

[puddleshark]

Phew. Nice one, Tennyson, old chap.

Not sure why it has to be symbolic though. Things lurking in the vasty deeps are sometimes just things lurking in the vasty deeps. Aaaaarrr. (Sorry. I was dancing in Weymouth with a bunch of pirates yesterday, and I've spent all day trying not to talk like a pirate at work... Aaaarrr.)

[graydon]

I tend to think of this one as apocalyptic imagery; there was a lot more sea-related such imagery around before the pictures started to appear in the middle of the last century.

(Particularly there's the idea that the seas will drain into Hell; any signs and portents in the sea have to happen before such a thing occurs.)

[larryhammer]

Those last lines swerve it into Christian Apocalypse territory for me as well.

[larryhammer]

And sometimes an albino sperm whale is just an albino sperm whale.

[puddleshark]

Heh!

[cmcmck]

It's symbolic of krakens, innit? :o)

[larryhammer]

That, or of albino sperm whales.