Following on from the popularity of a
post on Tennyson’s ‘To
Virgil’ (1882) I wrote in October, I thought I’d use ‘K’ in my Victorian
Alphabet to look at another of his poems – the shorter, and earlier ‘The Kraken’
– looking at each line of a poem in a little more depth, now that we’ve gone
through some of the first steps for approaching an unfamiliar text.
 |
| A kraken |
Below the thunders of the upper deep; 1
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 5
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. 10
There hath he lain for ages and will lie
Battening upon huge seaworms 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. 15
The first step identified last time was to ask ‘what is this
poem about?’ or ‘do I understand what’s going on here?’. And these questions
lead naturally to the question ‘what additional information do I require to
understand what’s going on here?’.
Whereas for ‘To Virgil’ a large amount of knowledge was
required (e.g. an awareness of Virgil’s work, a basic understanding of the history
of European empires), here there is relatively little to look up. A ‘kraken’ is
a sea monster, with mythic Scandinavian origins; a polyp or polypus is a sea
organism with a central mouth surrounded by tentacles.
We might summarise: ‘In ‘The Kraken’ (1830), Tennyson
describes a sleeping sea monster. At the end of the world, the sea monster will
come to the surface and be seen for the first time – then it will die.’ But even
this apparently straightforward summary raises issues. How does Tennyson
describe something that’s never been seen (‘once by man and angels to be seen’)?
Does he actually describe the kraken at
all?
To address these concerns, let’s look at what we actually
learn about the kraken. The first ten lines introduce the monster, with its
name emphatically positioned at the start of line 4.
The first two lines set the scene literally and
atmospherically – the kraken is in such a deep part of the sea that it is not
just ‘far beneath’, but ‘far, far beneath’ regions of the ocean already described
as ‘deep’ – the repetition serving to strengthen Tennyson’s description. The
very first word of the poem is ‘below’, directing the reader’s attention to
this lower world, while the verb ‘thunders’ plays (at least!) a treble role: it
creates an ominous atmosphere, suggesting an approaching storm; it introduces
the idea of aural, as well as geographic, ‘depth’, suggesting creatures of
immense size; and it helps paint a separate submarine reality, where the upper
reaches of the world, complete with the weather systems we associate with the
sky, are all below the surface of the sea. The word ‘abysmal’ demonstrates the
dual function of Tennyson’s description (to convey atmosphere as well as fact)
perfectly. The sea is ‘abysmal’, in that it is a deep ‘abyss’, but it is also
miserable, threatening and bleak.
Tennyson has brought us there – we are ready to see the
kraken which lives in such an alien and terrifying landscape. We might expect something
like this:
‘Below the thunders of the upper deep;
Far, far beneath in the abysmal sea,
His massive, dang’rous, uninviting arms
The Kraken flaileth’
Well okay, Tennyson would have found a rhyme.
But Tennyson in fact doesn’t describe the creature in this
place at all. With a sharp change of perspective from the guiding third person
we might have expected, the next lines actually give us the experience of being the kraken, not seeing it.
‘His ancient, dreamless, uninvaded sleep
The Kraken sleepeth’
There is the same sense of scale here – the kraken has age,
as his home has depth – but further ideas are also introduced. The word ‘uninvaded’
casts anyone who would disturb the creature in the role of aggressor, rather
than the monster itself, while the detail that this sleep is ‘dreamless’ makes
the kraken unknowable, and its consciousness unfathomable, even at the very
point where we most identify with it.
It is our inability to see, describe or understand the
kraken which dominates lines 4-10.
‘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.’
The dingy ‘sickly’ lighting conditions in the depths of the
ocean limit our ability to see the creature in his entirety, as does, it is
suggested, the fact of his immense size. The phrase ‘shadowy sides’ leaves it
ambiguous as to whether they are ‘shadowy’ only because of the lack of light or
because of the kraken’s own towering form. Rather than tell us the kraken is
large, Tennyson describes the great size of the other creatures which surround
him (‘huge sponges of millennial growth and height’, ‘enormous polypi/…with
giant arms’), so we will imagine this monster is even larger, while he also
reemphasises the impossibility of comprehending this being or the world he
lives in by reference to quantities beyond those computable to the human mind (‘unnumbered’,
‘millennial’).
Part of making this world so uncanny involves describing it
in ways which are almost repulsive, while maintaining a sense of the miraculous.
Describing a world as ‘wondrous’ and ‘secret’ seems attractive but, in keeping
with the ‘sickly’ nature of this deep an hidden world, the choice of the word ‘grot’
for ‘grotto’ and the coupling of ‘secret’ with ‘cell’, suggesting ‘secretion’ is off-putting, even revolting. The
final line of this sentence – ‘winnow with giant arms the slumbering green’ –
is perhaps the poem’s most beautiful, but the new idea which comes next, in the
sonnet-like turn (although the poem is 15 lines, not 14), that the kraken will
not sleep forever, means the full force of all that has been horrifying or unnerving
in the description of the kraken’s world is again made apparent.
The immediate shift which comes though is not one of the
kraken’s imminent arising, as we are first told about the continuance of this
state (‘There hath he lain for ages and will lie’). The greater shift is in the
knowledge level of the poet – the prominence Tennyson himself comes to, as some
sort of all-knowing oracle, rather than a man whose knowledge of the kraken is
as necessarily limited as our own through our inability to understand his
external being or internal motivations. ‘Then once by man and angels to be seen’
could be a prediction or a decree that something must be so, just as we saw
Tennyson set himself up as a prophet-like figure in ‘To Virgil’.
Still, what we are left with is still a sense of the kraken
as indescribable and unknowable. The creature’s purpose is unclear as he
appears to be waiting for something in his slumber but ‘In roaring he shall
rise and on the surface die’ rather than effect any damage. What has this
creature from Norse myth to do with a Christian apocalypse? Would the act of
explicitly describing the creature in actual fact destroy him, like his own ‘roaring’?
Is the kraken’s power in its invisibility?
If we return to summarising Tennyson’s poem we can say: ‘In
‘The Kraken’ (1830), Tennyson doesn’t describe a sleeping sea monster.’ And the
poem is all the more powerful for that.
What should be ‘L’ in my Victorian Alphabet? Do you have any
thoughts on, questions about or insights into Tennyson’s ‘The Kraken’? And what
would you like the Secret Victorianist to write about next? Let me know here,
on
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@SVictorianist.
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