Published 1830, not reprinted until restored in 1872, ‘Juvenilia’. T. comments: ‘See the account which Erik Pontoppidan, the Norwegian bishop, born 1698, gives of the fabulous sea-monster – the Kraken (Biographie Universelle)’ [1823]. Pontoppidan’s account was summarized in the English Encyclopaedia (1802), of which a copy was at Somersby (Lincoln). T. would also have read of the kraken in Scott’s Ministrelsy (Leyden’s The Mermaid), and in T. C. Croker’s Fairy Legends ii (1828) 64, a book which he knew and later owned (Lincoln). Paden (p. 155) observes that T.’s monster has only its name in common with Pontoppidan’s, and argues that T. associated it with G. S. Faber’s religious mythologizing, where the serpent (the evil principle) leads to the deluge: hence the sea-snake, and hence the ‘latter fire’. On T.’s later owning books by Faber, see p. 149. D. Bush, Major British Writers (1959) ii 380, cites Revelation xiii 1, ‘And I stood upon the sand of the sea, and saw a beast rise up out of the sea.’ The adaptation of the sonnet form is discussed by R. Pattison, Tennyson and Tradition (1979), pp. 41–2. Ian Kennedy suggests adding to the sources a dream in Lytton’s Falkland (1827, p. 269), a book T. knew (Letters i 23): ‘He was a thousand fathoms beneath the sea… he saw the coral banks, which it requires a thousand ages to form, rise slowly… and ever and ever, around and above him, came vast and misshapen things, – the wonders of the secret deeps; and the sea-serpent, the huge chimera of the north, made its resting place by his side, glaring upon him with a livid and death-like eye, wan, yet burning as an expiring sun’ (PQ lvii, 1978, 97).
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 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.
[1830. The Sleeping Beauty – see p. 172]
¶113.7. sickly light: OED 6, ‘of light, colour’, from Prior, An English Ballad 135 (1695).
9. Pontoppidan: ‘This Krake must be of the Polypus kind, notwithstanding its enormous size’ (Natural History of Norway (tr. 1755) ii 217).
10. arms] 1872; fins 1830. Pontoppidan ii 210: ‘full of arms’. Winnow: in this sense, influenced by Milton, Paradise Lost v 269–70: ‘Then with quick Fann / Winnows the buxom Air’. T. probably observed Shelley’s fondness for winnow. For the context, cp. Timbuctoo 146–51: ‘My thoughts which long had grovelled in the slime / Of this dull world, like dusky worms which house / Beneath unshaken waters, but at once / Upon some Earth-awakening day of Spring / Do pass from gloom to glory, and aloft / Winnow the purple.’
12. Shelley, Prometheus Unbound IV 542: ‘The dull weed some seaworm battens on’. The kraken’s ‘ability to feed while sleeping may have been suggested by [Pontoppidan’s] account of a strong scent by which krakens attract fish into their clutches’ (Paden, p. 155).
13–15. Revelation viii 8–9: ‘And the second angel sounded, and as it were a great mountain burning with fire was cast into the sea; and the third part of the sea became blood; And the third part of the creatures which were in the sea, and had life, died.’ In Faberian terms (see headnote), this was ‘another in that series of dissolutions of which the mystae were taught’ (Paden, p. 155).
14. man] 1830, 1872; men correction in 1830 Errata. Pontoppidan ii 211–12: ‘Amongst the many great things which are in the ocean, and concealed from our eyes, or only presented to our view for a few minutes, is the