Alfred, Lord Tennyson – The Karken

Tennyson wrote a poem about a large mythical sea monster, what could be more Victorian? This is one of the poems where I just had to put my book down, and laugh, thinking to myself “How do people come up with this stuff?” I then had to look up exactly what a Kraken was. I loaded some images for your enjoyment…

These are delightful. After reading this poem the rest of Tennyson couldn’t be anything else but creepy and weird to me. He writes, “Winnow with giant arms the slumbering green./ There hath he lain for agaes and will lie/ Battening upon huge sea worms in his sleep” These are not the lush, romantic images I was used to in our reading. It wasn’t even gory, but it is still graphic. In these lines he is describing a huge sea monster flailing it’s enormous arms, which I imagine are scaly and slimly. The image also includes this beast devouring worms. Oddly enough this creature is peaceful. He is thought to be in actuality an oversized squid, which peacefully sleeps at the bottom of the ocean. This poem proves to me that poetry and literature can entail anything and everything.