About the Shark, phlegmatical one,
Pale sot of the Maldive sea,
The sleek little pilot-fish, azure and slim,
How alert in attendance be.
From his saw-pit of mouth, from his charnel of maw,
They have nothing of harm to dread,
But liquidly glide on his ghastly flank
Or before his Gorgonian head;
Or lurk in the port of serrated teeth
In white triple tiers of glittering gates,
And there find a haven when peril’s abroad,
An asylum in jaws of the Fates!
They are friends; and friendly they guide him to prey,
Yet never partake of the treat—
Eyes and brains to the dotard lethargic and dull,
Pale ravener of horrible meat.
Herman Melville
(1819–1891)
“‘Tis the voice of the Lobster: I heard him declare
“You have baked me too brown, I must sugar my hair.”
As a duck with its eyelids, so he with his nose
Trims his belt and his buttons, and turns out his toes.
When the sands are all dry, he is gay as a lark,
And will talk in contemptuous tones of the Shark:
But, when the tide rises and sharks are around,
His voice has a timid and tremulous sound.”
“I passed by his garden, and marked, with one eye,
How the Owl and the Panther were sharing a pie:
The Panther took pie-crust, and gravy, and meat,
While the Owl had the dish as its share of the treat.
When the pie was all finished, the Owl, as a boon,
Was kindly permitted to pocket the spoon:
While the Panther received knife and fork with a growl,
And concluded the banquet by—
Lewis Carroll
(1832–1898)
The Smile of the Walrus is wide and distraught,
And tinged with pale purples and green,
Like the Smile of a Thinker who thinks a Great Thought,
And isn’t quite sure what it means.
Oliver Herford
(1863–1935)
When the cabin port-holes are dark and green
Because of the seas outside;
When the ship goes wop (with a wiggle between)
And steward falls into the soup-tureen,
And trunks begin to slide;
When Nursey lies on the floor in a heap,
And Mummy tells you to let her sleep,
And you aren’t waked or washed or dressed,
Why, then you will know (if you haven’t guessed)
You’re “Fifty North and Forty West!”
Rudyard Kipling
(1865–1936)
Of Neptune’s empire let us sing,
At whose command the waves obey;
To whom the rivers tribute pay,
Down the high mountains sliding:
To whom the scaly nation yields
Homage for the crystal fields
Wherein they dwell:
And every sea-dog pays a gem
Yearly out of his wat’ry cell
To deck great Neptune’s diadem.
The Tritons dancing in a ring
Before his palace gates do make
The water with their echoes quake,
Like the great thunder sounding:
The sea-nymphs chant their accents shrill,
And the sirens, taught to kill
With their sweet voice,
Make ev’ry echoing rock reply
Unto their gentle murmuring noise
The praise of Neptune’s empery.
Thomas Campion
(1567–1620)
O, I am the Great Bull Whale!
In the storm you shall hear me bellow,
Power bestride of my shoulders, as I tumble the seas aside:
I thrash the deep from ooze to foam, and I churn the froth
all yellow;
For Wa-ha! I am hale—
And when I make sail
My sundering bulk hurls the billows aside
Hurls the billows aside—
Takes a league in a stride,
And slogs, with a bellow, the face of the storm,
’Tis naught when the blood’s running warm!
For ‘tis naught when the blood’s running warm, Wa! Ha!
The might of my bulk in the face of the storm!
With me! Wa! Ha! Ha!
It has far too much side
For a bit of a breeze on the top of the tide!
For I am the Great Bull Whale!
I smite the sea with my tail—
At the thundering sound the oceans resound
And the Albicore tumbles into a swound
For Wa-ha! I am hale,
And when I make sail
My thundering bulk roars over the tides,
Roars over the tides,
And everything hides,
Save the Albicore-fool! a-splitting his sides—
A fish-kangeroo a-jumping the tides.
For he’s naught but a fish and a half, Wa! Ha!
A haddock far less than a young bull calf!
With me! Wa! Ha! Ha!
He has far too much side
For a bit of haddock a-jump in the tide!
Yes, I am the Great Bull Whale!
I have shattered the moon when asleep
On the face of the deep, by a stroke of my sweep
I have shattered its features pale.
Like the voice of a wandering gale
Is the smite of my sounding tail,
For Wa-ha! I am hale,
And when I make sail
My thundering bulk roars over the tide,
Roars over the tide,
And scatters it wide,
And laughs at the moon afloat on its side—
‘Tis naught but a star that has died!
For ‘tis naught but a star that had died, Wa! Ha!
A matter of cinders afloat in the Wide!
With me Wa! Ha! Ha!
It has far too much side
For a cinder afloat in the tide!
William Hope Hodgson
(1877–1918)
This is the ship of pearl, which, poets feign
Sails the unshadowed main,—
The venturous bark that flings
On the sweet summer wind its purpled wings
In gulfs enchanted, where the siren sings,
And coral reefs lie bare,
Where the cold sea-maids rise to sun their streaming hair.
Its web of living gauze no more unfurl;
Wrecked is the ship of pearl!
And every chambered cell,
Where its dim dreaming life was wont to dwell,
As the frail tenant shaped his growing shell,
Before thee lies revealed,—
Its irised ceiling rent, its sunless crypt unsealed!
Year after year beheld the silent toil
That spread his lustrous coil;
Still, as the spiral grew,
He left the past’s year dwelling for the new,
Stole with soft step its shining archway through,
Built up its idle door,
Stretched in his last-found home, and knew the old no more.
Thanks for the heavenly message brought by thee,
Child of the wandering sea,
Cast from her lap, forlorn!
From thy dead lips a clearer note is born
Than ever Triton blew from wreathèd horn!
While on mine ear it rings,
Through the deep caves of thought I hear a voice
that sings:—
Build thee more stately mansions, O my soul,
As the swift seasons roll!
Leave thy low-vaulted past!
Let each new temple, nobler than the last,
Shut thee from heaven with a dome more vast,
Till thou at length art free,
Leaving thine outgrown shell by life’s unresting sea!
Oliver Wendell Holmes
(1809–1894)
Now when, beneath the riotous drinking,
The witches found the liquor sinking
So low their ladles couldn’t reach it,
The blacksmith with a blazing larynx
Organized a swordfish phalanx
And charged the cauldron plate to breach it.
Back from its copper flanks they fell,
The smith had done his work too well.
A Greek:
From such a race of myrmidons
Our heroes and our Marathons.
Fabius Maximus:
It’s but the fury of despair.
A French General:
Magnifique! Mais ce n’est pas la guerre.
Napoleon:
By some such wild demonic means
My astral promise was undone.
Nelson:
By spirits like to such marines
Trafalgar and the Nile were won.
Full ten feet thick that plate was wrought,
And yet those swordfish tried to ram it;
Unthinking fools! I never thought
The sea so full of numskulls, dammit!
Satan:
Now by my hoof, this recipe
Is worth a million souls to me;
But lo! what mortal creature there
Grins, haunched upon the parapet,
Whose fierce, indomitable stare
I long have dreamed of, but not met?
Maryan:
Most sovereign and most sulphurous lord!
We, with the help of Cretans, made
This circumambient palisade
Of this great height and strength, to ward
Off such invaders as might mar
Our feast, and then as sentinel —
Chief vigilante out of hell —
We stationed HIM from Zanzibar.
Satan:
Good! From such audacious seed
Sprang Heaven’s finest, fallen breed,
Maryan! Ardath! Lulu!
Try out upon this cat, the brew.
Edwin John Pratt
(1883–1964)
My Dolphin, you only guide me by surprise,
a captive as Racine, the man of craft,
drawn through his maze of iron composition
by the incomparable wandering voice of Phèdre.
When I was troubled in mind, you made for my body
caught in its hangman’s-knot of sinking lines,
the glassy bowing and scraping of my will. …
I have sat and listened to too many
words of the collaborating muse,
and plotted perhaps too freely with my life,
not avoiding injury to others,
not avoiding injury to myself—
to ask compassion… this book, half fiction,
an eelnet made by man for the eel fighting
my eyes have seen what my hand did.
Robert Lowell
(1917–1977)
This coral’s shape echoes the hand
It hollowed. Its
Immediate absence is heavy. As pumice,
As your breast in my cupped palm.
Sea-cold, its nipple rasps like sand,
Its pores, like yours, shone with salt sweat.
Bodies in absence displace their weight,
And your smooth body, like none other,
Creates an exact absence like this stone
Set on a table with a whitening rack
Of souvenirs. It dares my hand
To claim what lovers’ hands have never known:
The nature of the body of another.
Derek Walcott
(1930—)
They say the sea is cold, but the sea contains
the hottest blood of all, and the wildest, the most urgent.
All the whales in the wider deeps, hot are they, as they urge
on and on, and dive beneath the icebergs.
The right whales, the sperm-whales, the hammer-heads, the killers
there they blow, there they blow, hot wild white breath out of the sea!
And they rock, and they rock, through the sensual ageless ages
on the depths of the seven seas,
and through the salt they reel with drunk delight
and in the tropics tremble they with love
and roll with massive, strong desire, like gods.
Then the great bull lies up against his bride
in the blue deep bed of the sea
as mountain pressing on mountain, in the zest of life:
and out of the inward roaring of the inner red ocean of whale blood
the long tip reaches strong, intense, like the maelstrom-tip, and comes to rest
in the clasp and the soft, wild clutch of a she-whale’s fathomless body.
And over the bridge of the whale’s strong phallus, linking the wonder of whales
the burning archangels under the sea keep passing, back and forth,
keep passing, archangels of bliss
from him to her, from her to him, great Cherubim
that wait on whales in mid-ocean, suspended in the waves of the sea
great heaven of whales in the waters, old hierarchies.
And enormous mother whales lie dreaming suckling their
whale-tender young
and dreaming with strange whale eyes wide open in the waters of
the beginning and the end.
And bull-whales gather their women and whale-calves in a ring
when danger threatens, on the surface of the ceaseless flood
and range themselves like great fierce Seraphim facing the threat,
encircling their huddled monsters of love.
And all this happens in the sea, in the salt
where God is also love, but without words:
and Aphrodite is the wife of whales most happy, happy she!
and Venus among the fishes skips and is a she-dolphin
she is the gay, delighted porpoise sporting with love and the sea
she is the female tunny-fish, round and happy among the males
and dense with happy blood, dark rainbow bliss in the sea.
D.H. Lawrence
(1885–1930)
A purple whale
Proudly sweeps his tail
Towards Nineveh;
Glassy green
Surges between
A mile of roaring sea.
“O town of gold,
Of splendour multifold,
Lucre and lust,
Leviathan’s eye
Can surely spy
Thy doom of death and dust.”
On curving sands
Vengeful Jonah stands.
“Yet forty days,
Then down, down,
Tumbles the town
In flaming ruin ablaze.”
With swift lament
They cry in tears,
“Our hearts fail!”
The whale, the whale!
Our sins prick us like spears.”
Jonah is vexed;
He cries, “What next? what next?”
And shakes his fist.
“Stupid city,
The shame, the pity,
The glorious crash I’ve missed.”
Away goes Jonah grumbling,
Murmuring and mumbling;
Off ploughs the purple whale,
With disappointed tail.
Robert Graves
(1895–1985)
