Both Alfred Lord Tennyson’s ‘The Kraken’ and Lewis Carroll’s ‘Jabberwocky’ are poems concerning fictional monsters. ‘Jabberwocky’ by Carroll first appeared in ‘Through the Looking Glass and What Alice Found There’ and concerns a young man’s attempt to slay a monster called the Jabberwocky. Tennyson’s ‘The Kraken’ is based on a Norse myth of a legendary monster that sleeps beneath the ocean. Both poems obviously share a similar theme. Yet differ in their format, syntax and use of poetic devices, these contrasts contribute to a very different representation of both monsters.
The first notable contrast in how both poets represents their monsters is through the use of language in each poem. The amusing and light-hearted tone Carroll creates in his poem ‘Jabberwocky’ through the use of nonsense words and poetic devices such as onomatopoeia (1.3) and portmanteau (1.24) lends the poem an absurdity that his younger audiences would have enjoyed and makes it hard to take his monster seriously.
In contrast, Tennyson chooses to create an ominous tone in ‘The Kraken’ through the impression of the immense size and age of his monster.
“"sponges of millennial growth ... sickly light... unnumber'd and enormous polypi".
Tennyson, A. ‘The Kraken’ p.139 reprinted in The Farber Book of Beasts (2010.)
Whilst Carroll completely invents his words, Tennyson instead juxtaposes scientific phrases such as sea sponges and polypi with the mythical nature of his subject along with references to the apocalypse to build tension in his work.
Additional contrasts can be seen when analysing the structure of each poem. Despite its fame as a nonsense poem, ‘Jabberwocky’ follows a traditional layout known as Ballad Stanza and uses a traditional rhyming scheme a...
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...ber and Faber, pp. 135-136.
ii. Tennyson, A.L, ‘The Kraken’ in Muldoon, P. (ed.) (1997) The Faber Book of Beasts, London, Faber and Faber, p.139.
iii. Danson Brown, R. (2008) ‘Reading Poetry: The Farber Book of Beasts’, in Danson Brown, R. (ed.) AA100 Book 2 Tradition and Dissent, Milton Keynes, The Open University pp. 41-69 iv. Shmoop Editorial Team. (2008) ‘Jabberwocky’, [Online], at http://www.shmoop.com/jabberwocky/ (accessed 6 January, 2014).
v. Osborne, K.. Kissel, A. (ed.) (2013)’Tennyson's Poems Study Guide : Summary and Analysis of "Crossing the Bar’. [Online] at http://www.gradesaver.com/tennysons-poems/study-guide/section4/" (accessed 8 January 2014).
vi. Wikipedia contributors, (2013) ‘Ballad stanza’, Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia, [Online], at http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Ballad_stanza&oldid=552937560 (accessed 6 January, 2014).
This essay is anchored on the goal of looking closer and scrutinizing the said poem. It is divided into subheadings for the discussion of the analysis of each of the poem’s stanzas.
"The monstropolous beast had left his bed. The two hundred miles an hour wind had loosed his chains. He seized hold of his dikes and ran forward until he met the quarters; uprooted them like grass and rushed on after his supposed-to-be conquerors, rolling the dikes, rolling the houses, rolling the people in the houses along with other timbers. The sea was walking the earth with a heavy heel.
Frankenstein is the story of an eccentric scientist whose masterful creation, a monster composed of sown together appendages of dead bodies, escapes and is now loose in the country. In Frankenstein, Mary Shelly’s diction enhances fear-provoking imagery in order to induce apprehension and suspense on the reader. Throughout this horrifying account, the reader is almost ‘told’ how to feel – generally a feeling of uneasiness or fright. The author’s diction makes the images throughout the story more vivid and dramatic, so dramatic that it can almost make you shudder.
Asma, Stephen. On Monsters :An Unnatural History of Our Worst Fears. New York: Oxford University Press, 2009. Print.
Frankenstein, speaking of himself as a young man in his father’s home, points out that he is unlike Elizabeth, who would rather follow “the aerial creations of the poets”. Instead he pursues knowledge of the “world” though investigation. As the novel progresses, it becomes clear that the meaning of the word “world” is for Frankenstein, very much biased or limited. He thirsts for knowledge of the tangible world and if he perceives an idea to be as yet unrealised in the material world, he then attempts to work on the idea in order to give it, as it were, a worldly existence. Hence, he creates the creature that he rejects because its worldly form did not reflect the glory and magnificence of his original idea. Thrown, unaided and ignorant, into the world, the creature begins his own journey into the discovery of the strange and hidden meanings encoded in human language and society. In this essay, I will discuss how the creature can be regarded as a foil to Frankenstein through an examination of the schooling, formal and informal, that both of them go through. In some ways, the creature’s gain in knowledge can be seen to parallel Frankenstein’s, such as, when the creature begins to learn from books. Yet, in other ways, their experiences differ greatly, and one of the factors that contribute to these differences is a structured and systematic method of learning, based on philosophical tenets, that is available to Frankenstein but not to the creature.
Therefore, Oliver’s incorporation of imagery, setting, and mood to control the perspective of her own poem, as well as to further build the contrast she establishes through the speaker, serves a critical role in creating the lesson of the work. Oliver’s poem essentially gives the poet an ultimatum; either he can go to the “cave behind all that / jubilation” (10-11) produced by a waterfall to “drip with despair” (14) without disturbing the world with his misery, or, instead, he can mimic the thrush who sings its poetry from a “green branch” (15) on which the “passing foil of the water” (16) gently brushes its feathers. The contrast between these two images is quite pronounced, and the intention of such description is to persuade the audience by setting their mood towards the two poets to match that of the speaker. The most apparent difference between these two depictions is the gracelessness of the first versus the gracefulness of the second. Within the poem’s content, the setting has been skillfully intertwined with both imagery and mood to create an understanding of the two poets, whose surroundings characterize them. The poet stands alone in a cave “to cry aloud for [his] / mistakes” while the thrush shares its beautiful and lovely music with the world (1-2). As such, the overall function of these three elements within the poem is to portray the
Strand, Mark and Evan Boland. The Making of a Poem: A Norton Anthology of Poetic Forms. New
Allison, Barrows, Blake, et al. eds. The Norton Anthology Of Poetry . 3rd Shorter ed. New York: Norton, 1983. 211.
We live in a world inhabited by Monsters. Monsters have been identified and represented in a myriad of ways since the birth of time and humanity. The intrusion of uniformity as we define it, the monster. Monsters have been depicted to frighten and agitate, to destruct and clout arguments, and to shape societies. In the chapter “Monster Culture (Seven Theses)”, Jeffrey Jerome Cohen argues with logic and reasoning to the way monsters have been interpreted far and near time. In everything we create, monsters are the by-products of our technology, the products of the things unconsidered. By inspecting our monsters, we divulge the intricacies of our culture, past and
One of the many staples of horror fiction is the employment of a monster to aide in the fear the reader experiences. A monster gives the protagonists a tangible object to fear. When the fear is tangible the protagonists are able to be drawn into the story in a more concrete manner. The reader is also able to be included in the fear because they can get a full picture of what is scaring the main characters. Unlike ghosts or spirits, monsters provide a visual representation of the fear to be experienced. One pair of monsters stand out from the others, this is the wolfman and the werewolf. On the surface, both are seemingly the same character with a different name, but this paper is going to explore the differences between the wolfman and the werewolf as they appear in fiction and how their different manifestations relates to the characters in the story and those behind the fur. This writer believes that although there are many similarities behind the werewolf and the wolfman, there are a few differences in how the characters are portrayed. This difference is shown primarily in The Wolfman by Jonathan Maberry and The Cycle of the Werewolf by Stephen king.
Blunden, Edmund and Heinemann, Eds. “Tennyson.” Selected Poems. London: Heinemann Educational Books, 1960. p.1. print.
The Tyger is an example of a poem that has an illustration that does not seem to match the poem. In the poem, the narrator describes a creature that is so fearsome and terrifying that he wonders about who created the tyger, but in the illustration, the tyger looks very harmless and almost like a cute little house cat. While the picture does not show the tyger’s fierceness, it could be showing something else. In the poem, the narrator inquiries about the creator. He wonders if the one
... Nature, including human beings, is `red in tooth and claw'; we are all `killers' in one way or another. Also, the fear which inhabits both human and snake (allowing us, generally, to avoid each other), and which acts as the catalyst for this poem, also precipitates retaliation. Instinct, it seems, won't be gainsaid by morality; as in war, our confrontation with Nature has its origins in some irrational `logic' of the soul. The intangibility of fear, as expressed in the imagery of the poem, is seen by the poet to spring from the same source as the snake, namely the earth - or, rather, what the earth symbolizes, our primitive past embedded in our subconsciouness. By revealing the kinship of feelings that permeates all Nature, Judith Wright universalises the experience of this poem.
Since the advent of art and writing, monsters have been at the forefront of human creation. From cave paintings of great beasts to the snake-haired gorgons of Greek myth, mankind has been fascinated by what frightens it. The horror genre is so eternally popular because it provokes a very intimate reaction from the audience. Just as comedy is met with laughter and tragedy with tears, horror is met with fear. Horror has taken its place not only as an artistic and literary medium but also as a facet of society. Monsters and fear motivate and inspire just as much as heroes and hope, shaping cultures and religions along lines of light and dark. One must look no farther than the skeletal depictions of Hell and its beasts in medieval manuscripts to see the social weight terror can wield. The pious medieval citizen was motivated equally by the feverish desire to stay out of hell as he was to gain access to heaven.
where the sun lights flee the kraken is battening up huge sea-worms in his sleep. Its huge