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.

These lines come from Alfred Lord Tennyson’s sonnet “The Kraken,” first published in his early volume Poems, Chiefly Lyrical (1830). Written during the period when Tennyson was establishing his reputation, the poem draws on classical and medieval sea-monster lore and on the Romantic-era fascination with the sublime, the abyssal, and the limits of human knowledge. The Kraken is imagined as an ancient creature sleeping in the ocean’s depths, unseen by humans, until the apocalyptic “latter fire” (an end-times conflagration) forces it to the surface. The passage quoted is the sonnet’s concluding vision of that final revelation and death.

Tennyson presents the Kraken as a symbol of what lies beyond ordinary perception: immense, ancient forces hidden beneath the surface of the known world. The creature “battening upon huge seaworms” suggests a slow, blind, almost geological life in the deep—powerful yet dormant. The “latter fire” invokes eschatology: only at the world’s end will the abyss yield its secrets, and even then the revelation is brief, violent, and terminal (“on the surface die”). The lines dramatize a paradox central to the sublime: the desire to see the unimaginable, coupled with the implication that such knowledge arrives only through catastrophe and annihilation.