The Kraken (poem)

"The Kraken" is a poem by Alfred Lord Tennyson, published in his collection Poems, Chiefly Lyrical (Effingham Wilson, 1830). It has been cited as a major influence on H. P. Lovecraft's story "The Call of Cthulhu" and on his conception of the entity Cthulhu.
==Text==
==Interpretation==
The critic Robert Preyer writes that Tennyson's poem describes "apocalyptic shapes unseen by the ordinary person," "mindless forces" that are capable of "exploding to the surface in a burst of irrational frenzy that marks the end of its peculiar life-in-death, the end of ordinary living, and also the onset of eternity."Victorian Studies, "Alfred Tennyson: The Poetry and Politics of Conservative Vision", by Robert Preyer, June 1966; quoted in Wikipedia, "The Kraken (poem)". 
Robert M. Price points to the parallels with Lovecraft's creature: a huge, octopoid sea monster, sleeping for ages at the bottom of the ocean (either "dreaming" or "dreamless"), and destined to emerge from his slumber in an apocalyptic age.The Cthulhu Cycle, "The Other Name of Azathoth", Robert M. Price (Chaosium, 1996).
==Form==
The poem is a variation on the Petrarchan sonnet, with 15 lines rather than 14. Its rhyme scheme is ABABCDDCEFEAAFE.Wikipedia, "The Kraken (poem)".
==Kraken==
The kraken was a giant sea creature that was believed to live off the coast of Norway. (Price suggests that this connection explains why Lovecraft's character Gustaf Johansen, the sailor who survives an encounter with Cthulhu, is Norwegian.) It's first mentioned as the sciu-crak in Viaggio settentrionale (Padua, 1700), an account by the Italian priest Francesco Negri of his travels in Scandinavia. Negri describes the creature as a massive "fish" with many arms or horns.Wikipedia, "Kraken".
In his Description of Greenland (1729), the Danish missionary Hans Egede describes it as a creature "having many heads and a number of claws," many miles in length, that had the ability to drag ships down to the depths. The Danish bishop Erik Pontoppidan, in The Natural History of Norway (1752-53), suggests that the kraken was a giant octopus, or perhaps a sort of starfish or crab.
The French zoologist Pierre Denys-Montfort's Histoire Naturelle Générale et Particulière des Mollusques (1802) included the "kraken octopus," which it described as perhaps the largest creature on the planet.
==References==
Category:Alfred Lord Tennyson works
Category:Mythos-Adjacent Works
Category:Lovecraft's Inspirations (works)