W. S. Merwin's The Leviathan

Ever since inception, humans have attempted to comprehend the world around them. We now understand how fire works. We navigated throughout all seven continents. We traversed the human genome. Despite these breakthroughs, there will always be objects that inspire and frighten. There will always be objects that lie within the horizon of our sight, and are interpreted as the Leviathan. In W.S. Merwin’s poem “The Leviathan”, the speaker describes the Leviathan, a mythical creature who has devoured large numbers of humans. Throughout the poem, the speaker’s attitude towards the Leviathan is conveyed as awestruck by the Leviathan’s exceptional features, yet fearful of its monstrous qualities. This attitude is portrayed through the speaker’s grandiose

Early in the poem, the Leviathan is a farmer “furrowing the salt acres.” By creating the image of a farmer, hard at work, plowing his farm and planting his seeds, the speaker’s attitude towards the Leviathan becomes appreciative and in awe of the vast ocean that the Leviathan seeks to plow. However, this bright image of the creature is corrupted by including that the Leviathan furrows through material made from salt, an object that removes the water, and thus the life from living objects. The speaker realizes that though the Leviathan works as hard as farmers, its goal is not to create life, but to remove it, causing the speaker to fear the Leviathan. Just as the Leviathan represents a corrupted farmer, it is portrayed as an “angel, although a lost angel.” Though the Leviathan was once a holy object, it has gone astray and now haunts the world. The speaker is conflicted seeing the corrupted holiness of the Leviathan, feeling both fear of its devilish actions and reverence for its angelic history. These corrupted aspects of the Leviathan cause it to always watch the world with one eye “dark of night,” and “with one eye dayrise,” representing the large range of the Leviathan’s intentions. The Leviathan has the honorable goal of protecting the living with one eye but also has control of death through its other, causing the

As the speaker remarks on the Leviathan, he also remarks on fear’s many forms as well as the often overlooked tie between fear and respect in society. By understanding that our tendency to explore the world is bound to our fear of the unknown, we are better able to describe the mysterious world around us and perceive the feelings of those who have had similar emotions in the