breathedout: Portrait of breathedout by Leontine Greenberg (bathtime)
breathedout ([personal profile] breathedout) wrote2018-12-18 01:13 pm

Not only is the sea such a foe to man

But not only is the sea such a foe to man who is an alien to it, but it is also a fiend to its own off-spring; worse than the Persian host who murdered his own guests; sparing not the creatures which itself hath spawned. Like a savage tigress that tossing in the jungle overlays her own cubs, so the sea dashes even the mightiest whales against the rocks, and leaves them there side by side with the split wrecks of ships. No mercy, no power but its own controls it. Panting and snorting like a mad battle steed that has lost its rider, the masterless ocean overruns the globe.


—Herman Melville, Moby-Dick, "Brit"

panting and snorting
like a mad battle steed that has lost its rider
the masterless ocean overruns the globe

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