Tennyson (1809-1892) wrote The Kraken (1830) when he was 20 and an undergraduate at Trinity College Cambridge. Although it caused a stir at the time, the poem disappeared for some 40 years. It’s now seen as a major poem of Tennyson’s, and an account of the poem forms most of the first chapter of The Boundless Deep: Young Tennyson, Science and the Crisis of Belief by Richard Holmes.

I know the poem but hadn’t recognised its importance until I read Holmes’s first chapter this morning. “The poem,” writes Holmes, “is composed of a fantastic mixture of Norse mythology, eighteenth-century zoology, nineteenth-century science fiction and the biblical Book of Revelations.” It is, he suggests, the first example of a science fiction poem.

At the beginning of the 19^th century the Kraken had a position similar to that of the Loch Ness monster today, although the Loch Ness monster is more comic than frightening. Revelationssays: “And I stood upon the sands of the sea, and saw a beast rise up out of the sea,” while the Book of Isaiah says: ‘In that day the Lord … will punish Leviathan the fleeing serpent, Leviathan the twisting serpent, and he will slay the dragon that is under the sea.’

For Mary Somerville, a mathematician and daughter of a fisherman, “it symbolised the mysteries and superstitions of nature that science, and especially mathematics, was trying to rationalise.”

“The Kraken,” writes Holmes, “becomes the symbol of a monstrous idea, which will eventually erupt among humanity: like the idea of relentless evolution; or a universe without a divine creator; or the inevitable extinction of every species on planet earth, including the human race itself.” It also represented deep unrest, uncertainty, and scepticism in Tennyson, who had read natural science as well as literature.

Coincidentally that loss of faith among Victorians prompted by Darwin’s On the Origins of Species (1859) and the discussions around and before it is the theme of Graham Swift’s Ever After, which I have just read and am about to blog about. Loss of faith and the desperate—and ultimately failed—attempt to replace it with some sort of philosophy was also prominent in the biography of Maynard Keynes that I read recently. https://richardswsmith.wordpress.com/2024/10/14/my-essence-of-an-852-page-biography-of-maynard-keynes-in-1500-words/ It’s hard for us in 2025 to relate to the catastrophe of losing the certainty of not only a moral compass but also the expectation of an afterlife, but we have our own losses of faith (more in my blog on Swift’s book).

The Kraken by Alfred Tennyson

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 fins the slumbering green.
There hath he lain for ages and will lie
Battering upon huge seaworms in his sleep,
Until the latter fire shall heat the deep;
Then once by men and angels to be seen,
In roaring he shall rise and on the surface die.