Sharks in Stories, Media, and Literature 219
Sharks have served as subject matter for innumerable poets. In honor
of the Discovery Channel’s “shark week,” the Academy of American Poets
publishes on its website Poems for Shark Week, with links to 26 shark po-
ems, including work by Carl Sandburg, Robert Graves, Rudyard Kipling,
James Dickey, and Walt Whitman (see http://www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/prm
MID/20916). The discussion at the site notes that “sharks have long served
as a cultural symbol of mortality and looming danger.” Examples include
Charles Wharton Stork’s “Flying Fish: An Ode,” in which the poet de-
scribes what it might be like to live in fear of sharks:
Enclosed above, beneath, before, behind
In green uncertainty, from which a shark
At any time may dash
And doom you like some huge demonic fate.Other small prey fish, such as schooling menhaden, lead a similar, danger-
filled existence in Isaac McLellan’s “The Bluefish”:
The vast menhaden multitudes
They massacre o’er the flood;
With lashing tail, with snapping teeth
They stain the tides with blood.Herman Melville, author of Moby Dick, wrote about the relationship be-
tween pilot fish and sharks in “The Maldive Shark.” Melville considered
sharks “lethargic and dull” scavengers. He was much more complimentary
towards the pilot fish, which he mistakenly thought sought refuge inside
the shark’s mouth and led sharks to food but then didn’t feed on the left-
overs:
The sleek little pilot-fish, azure and slim,
How alert in attendance be.
From his saw-pit of mouth, from his charnel of maw
They have nothing of harm to dread,
But liquidly glide on his ghastly flank
Or before his Gorgonian head;
Or lurk in the port of serrated teeth
In white triple tiers of glittering gates,
And there find a haven when peril’s abroad,
An asylum in jaws of the Fates!
They are friends; and friendly they guide him to prey,
Yet never partake of the treat—
Eyes and brains to the dotard lethargic and dull,
Pale ravener of horrible meat.