The Full Text of “Cetacean”
The Full Text of “Cetacean”
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“Cetacean” Introduction
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"Cetacean" was written by the contemporary British poet Peter Reading and published in his 2002 collection Faunal. The poem describes a boat trip to "observe" blue whales off the coast of San Francisco, and, for the most part, is relatively unsentimental and spare in its tone. At the same time, the poem conveys a sense of awe and wonder at the sight of the whales, even as the speaker attempts to quantify the experience using mathematical measurements and logical, scientific observations. The whales are gone almost as quickly as they appear, leaving behind an atmosphere of mystery surrounding the natural world. Some interpretations also view the poem as a kind of extended metaphor for the creative process itself, noting that moments of artistic inspiration are at once powerful and fleeting.
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“Cetacean” Summary
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The speaker describes leaving Fisherman's Wharf in San Francisco, California, early on a Sunday morning, in a boat that was sixty-three feet long. The group was hoping to see some blue whales—which they did, the speaker says, near the Farallones Islands.
The speaker goes on to describe the whales, often using mathematical terms to do so. The speaker says that the whales swam slowly, their bodies creating only a slight angle against the water's surface as they rose above it. In an aside, the speaker also compares the whales' splotchy, gray bodies to slate, a kind of rock, adding that their dorsal fins were small and short, while their wide, flat heads made up one fourth of their overall lengths.
The whales blew air out of their blowholes right at the moment that their heads rose above the water, creating straight, narrow jets of condensation that looked like columns on a building, rising thirty feet into the air.
Soon enough, the whales ducked their heads back under the water's surface, causing their vast, long backs to come into view. They were roughly twenty feet longer than the speaker's boat.
The group caught a quick glimpse of the whales' small dorsal fins after the animals had finished breathing and dipped their heads under the water again.
At this point, the whales bent their backs and tails in preparation for diving deeper into the ocean.
The group could glimpse only the top part of the whales' tails before the animals disappeared, diving into the mysterious depths of the ocean at a slight angle.
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“Cetacean” Themes
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The Mystery and Wonder of Nature
“Cetacean” explores the relationship between humanity and nature. No matter how detailed humanity’s observations might get, the poem implies that the natural world will always have a kind of beauty that eludes people’s grasp. It further suggests that human beings aren’t the only intelligent creatures on earth, and as such that nature is filled with a sense of mystery and wonder that onlookers can appreciate and be inspired by, yet which they may never fully understand.
The speaker, on one level at least, represents humanity’s thirst for knowledge—the desire to know nature, to categorize and explain it. This tendency is reflected by the poem's title itself—a Latin word that refers to an animal within the order Cetacea, a taxonomic rank.
The speaker goes on to make a series of journalistic points about the appearance and behavior of the whales, trying to capture the experience of spotting them faithfully. Note how the speaker uses approximate measurements like “twenty feet” instead of just saying that “the whales have long backs,” for example, and in doing so reveals a desire for precise knowledge, a need to pin down the experience as accurately as possible.
But though the speaker might be able to capture something of this experience through language and observation, the encounter with the whales is nevertheless fleeting and mysterious. There’s no real sense, in truth, that the human observers on the boat have learned anything profound about these majestic creatures. The poem is thus sympathetic towards the human desire for knowledge while also suggesting that these observations only serve to reinforce the natural world’s deep sense of awe and mystery.
What's more, the whales' presence undermines humanity’s sense of being special and unique among the creatures of the earth. To that end, the poem makes clear the whales’ behavior is not for the humans watching at all; the whales aren't there to entertain people or facilitate their quest for knowledge. The whales blow incredible column-like jets of water, but they're not doing this to impress the people watching. It’s the humans who go to the whales, not the other way around.
The whales are some of the largest creatures on earth, and yet they remain utterly elusive. They display both intelligence and sociability, living together as a kind of community totally independent of humanity. And, ultimately, the whales disappear almost as quickly as they show up, “vanish[ing]” back into the ocean's depths—a place where the human onlookers can’t follow. The speaker doesn’t necessarily lament their disappearance, but this person’s attempt to record every moment of the encounter only serves to underline that there is something that can’t be fully captured or understand by humanity.
Where this theme appears in the poem:- Lines 1-19
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Line-by-Line Explanation & Analysis of “Cetacean”
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Lines 1-3
...
... off the Farallones.Before looking at the first stanza of the poem, it's worth considering the specific word choice for the title. The poem is about a specific animal commonly known as the blue whale, but the title uses the very scientific-sounding "Cetacean." This word refers to the biological order Cetacea, a large group of aquatic mammals (totaling 89 species of whales, dolphins, and porpoises), and signals one of its main themes: the quest for knowledge and understanding. The scientific title speaks to the practices of observation, assessment, and classification—more broadly, to humanity's insistence on categorizing the natural world.
The poem then starts by describing the speaker's boat trip to "observe Blue Whales." The speaker and others have woken up early on a Sunday morning and sailed off the San Francisco coast in a boat "sixty-three" feet in length. The precise measurement here reflects the speaker attempts to chronicle the experience of seeing the whales in precise language.
Also note how the poem starts with a bunch of short phrases lacking any conjunctions. This asyndeton creates a choppy, detached tone. The poem thus seems remarkably spare and unsentimental so far—almost like a scientist's brief field notes.
But, already, there's more going on here than meets the eye. First, note that it's a Sunday—which in Christian tradition is the day of rest. Perhaps, then, it's not too much of a stretch to think of the poem's set-up as a subtle nod to a kind of human restlessness when it comes to making sense of the world.
It's also worth noting how the poem makes no effort to build a will-they-or-won't-they-see-the-whales kind of suspense. After the caesura in line 3 (that dash after "Whales"), the speaker makes clear that the group did in fact spot some of the creatures "off the Farallones" (a group of islands in the Pacific Ocean). The poem thus immediately becomes about the encounter itself, and not whether that encounter is going to happen.
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Lines 4-6
...
... their overall body-lengths). -
Lines 7-9
They blew as ...
... in vertical sprays. -
Lines 10-12
Then their heads ...
... the vessel herself. -
Lines 13-17
...
... for diving. -
Lines 18-19
Then the flukes ...
... a shallow angle.
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“Cetacean” Symbols
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The Whales
Whales in the poem may symbolize a few things. Most obviously, they represent the mysteriousness and wonder of the natural world—something the poem suggests exceeds human understanding.
Whales are enormous, intelligent creatures that exist entirely independent of human beings—who don't actually know all that much about them. The speaker's attempt to capture the whales' movements in precise, scientific language reflects the human desire to understand the natural world—something that the poem implies isn't always possible. The speaker sees only the surface of things—quite literally—and is unable to follow the creatures into the ocean's depths. Through the whales, then, the poem suggests the limits of human knowledge and understanding.
It's also important to note that whales have been fascinating people and showing up in art for a long time. For example, think of the biblical story of Jonah, who, in some translations, is famously being swallowed whole by a whale after disobeying God. And, of course, there's the idea of a "white whale" being something obsessively, yet fruitlessly, pursued (the metaphor is of course taken from the most famous whale tale of all: Moby-Dick).
In a more metaphorical reading of the poem, whales might also represent artistic inspiration or creativity. They rise from mysterious depths without any human input, briefly awe onlookers, and then vanish. Such is the nature of inspiration, the poem may be implying—something that human beings can't quite understand or control. The powerful blasts of condensed air that blow "as straight and slim as upright columns" evoke the sudden jolt of inspiration as well, the sensation akin to a lightbulb going off.
Where this symbol appears in the poem:- Lines 4-19
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“Cetacean” Poetic Devices & Figurative Language
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Alliteration
Alliteration appears throughout "Cetacean," adding moments of lyricism to what is an otherwise straightforward, methodical description of the whales. Take lines 7 to 8, for example, with their bold /b/ and slippery /s/ sounds:
They blew as soon as their heads began to break the surface.
The blows were as straight and slim [...]The speaker is describing the marvelous sight of the whales breathing. As they expel air from their blowholes, it condenses and looks like powerful jets of water. The firm /b/ sound here requires the reader to similarly spurt out air, and it evokes the force with which these "blows" erupt. The alliteration in line 14's "briefly" and "blows" does the same thing.
The speaker again turns to alliteration in line 13 with the phrase "diminutive dorsals." The two /d/ sounds here are cutesy and perhaps even a bit cartoonish, evoking the speaker's impression of how the small dorsal fin looks on the huge "expanse" of the whales' backs.
Finally, line 18 uses alliteration for contrast:
Then the flukes were visible just before the creatures vanished,
The alliteration here draws attention to the whales' quick disappearance beneath the water; they are visible only for a moment before they vanish, or disappear, from the speaker's view.
Where alliteration appears in the poem:- Line 1: “Fisherman's,” “San,” “Francisco,” “Sunday”
- Line 2: “stern, some sixty”
- Line 4: “swimming slowly”
- Line 5: “with white”
- Line 7: “blew,” “soon,” “began,” “break,” “surface”
- Line 8: “blows,” “straight,” “slim”
- Line 9: “sprays”
- Line 13: “diminutive dorsals”
- Line 14: “briefly,” “blows”
- Line 18: “visible,” “vanished”
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Anaphora
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Assonance
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Asyndeton
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Consonance
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Enjambment
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Sibilance
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Simile
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Extended Metaphor
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"Cetacean" Vocabulary
Select any word below to get its definition in the context of the poem. The words are listed in the order in which they appear in the poem.
- Fisherman's Wharf
- Bow to stern
- Farallones
- Slate
- Mottling
- Stubby
- Dorsals
- Expanse
- Hove
- Diminutive
- Dispersed
- Tail Stocks
- Flukes
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(Location in poem: Line 1: “Out of Fisherman's Wharf, San Francisco”)
A famous waterfront in San Francisco, California. It's touristy, hence its status as a point of departure for boat tours (e.g., to see whales, or, quite differently, Alcatraz).
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Form, Meter, & Rhyme Scheme of “Cetacean”
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Form
"Cetacean" consists of 19 lines broken up into five tercets (three-line stanzas) and two couplets. The stanzas thus get shorter as the poem goes along.
The first three stanzas are the longest, as the speaker introduces the trip and begins to describe the whales. As soon as the whales begin to dive back into the water, however, the stanzas become less and less dense.
For example, stanza 4 ("Then their heads [...] the vessel herself") has less text than does stanza 3. Stanza 4 is also a subtle example of concrete poetry; note how lines 10 and 11 stretch out to represent the length of whales' bodies, which then immediately contrasts with the shortness line 12 that belongs to "the vessel [the boat] herself":
Then their heads disappeared underwater, and the lengthy, rolling
expanse of their backs hove into our view — about twenty feet longer
than the vessel herself.The following two stanzas then get shorter and shorter still, the sudden increase of white space evoking the whales' disappearance into the water; it's as though the speaker's observations themselves are being swallowed by the ocean.
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Meter
"Cetacean" is written in free verse, meaning it doesn't use a regular meter. This keeps the poem feeling prose-like and natural, like these are simply the speaker's immediate observations and reflections upon seeing the whales. This also shifts the focus away from the poem's rhythms to its word choices, and makes poetic elements like alliteration and simile stand out more prominently.
Most of the poem's lines are quite long as well, which makes its three very short ones all the more striking. Line 12—"than the vessel herself"—visually represents the way that the boat is dwarfed by the long length of the blue whales (described in the preceding two lines), while lines 15 ("gone under") and 17 ("for diving") both relate to the whales' "vanish[ing]" beneath the water's surface. This emphasizes the whales mysterious, majestic presence, accenting their absence by creating lines surrounded by space.
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Rhyme Scheme
As a free verse poem, "Cetacean" has no rhyme scheme. In fact, there aren't any true rhymes in the poem at all. Consonance and assonance lend the poem music and may make readers think of rhyme on occasion (in moments like "blew as soon," or "expanse of their backs"), but again there's no overarching pattern of rhyme here. Using rhyme would perhaps feel too self-consciously poetic and false a poem about the mysteries of nature.
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“Cetacean” Speaker
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The poem gives very little away about its speaker, shifting the reader's focus almost entirely onto the whales themselves. As with any poem, though, there is a speaker, and in this case it's an individual who is part of a boat trip to see blue whales. Like the other people on the boat, the speaker wants to "observe" the whales, a word that carries with it connotations of ceremony and ritual (think of how people may "observe" a minute's silence).
The speaker seems to be pulled in two directions at once. On the one hand, the speaker wants to quantify everything—the length of the boat, the size of the whales' heads in relation to their bodies, the height of the spray that erupts as they breathe. This tendency also comes out in the methodical, chronological way in which the poem takes the reader through the encounter, the speaker carefully breaking down each movement the whales makes. The speaker, then, has a desire to know and understand.
But the speaker also wants to capture the more emotional, moving part of this experience—things that defy such precise recording. Once the whales actually arrive, the speaker casts off the detached, choppy lines of the first stanza and opts for more carefully constructed language, using techniques like alliteration ("swimming slowly") and simile ("grey as slate"). The speaker seems at once like an unsentimental poet and a poetic amateur scientist.
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“Cetacean” Setting
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The poem takes place during a boat trip of the coast of San Francisco, California. The boat takes off from a real place called Fisherman's Wharf, a popular tourist area offering boat trips to see sights including blue whales and even the infamous Alcatraz Island.
The speaker takes care to describe the setting as accurately as possible for the reader—pointing out that it's early on a Sunday morning, that the boat is "some sixty-three feet" long, and that the whales are spotted "off the Farallones," a group of islands off the California coast.
But also note how the poem plays with time in the opening stanza compared to the rest of the poem. The first stanza compresses a fair length of time into a small space—referencing the boat leaving the harbor and finding the whales in short, sketchy phrases. This signals that the human side of the poem—what happened on the shore, who is on the boat, etc.—is far less important than the whales themselves.
Once the whales do appear, the poem takes everything very slowly—even though the actual sight of the whales doesn't last long. The speaker describes the whales' actions bit-by-bit, step-by-step, trying to faithfully capture the experience—and then to reconstruct that experience through poetic language.
Also note how the setting emphasizes the distance between the whales and the observers. The onlookers on the boat can only see the parts of the whales as they breach the surface of the water; they never actually see the whales' entire bodies all at once. This reflects the way that human beings may never be able to fully grasp or understand the mysteries of the natural world, which extends well beyond the human realm. The speaker's understanding of the whales remains shallow, surface-level. The whales may briefly come into view, but then they dive below the water where human beings can't follow.
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Literary and Historical Context of “Cetacean”
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Literary Context
Peter Reading published "Cetacean" in his 2002 collection Faunal. The word "Cetacean" comes from the Latin Cetacea, the name for a taxonomic order of marine mammals. Many of the poems in this collection feature Latin names as well, and revolve around similar themes related to the wonder of the natural world and its many mysterious creatures—as well as humanity's attempts to understand, and often dominate, those creatures.
Whales have long occupied a prominent place in the human imagination. They may even appear in the Bible (though the Hebrew phrase, "dag gadol," translates more literally as "big fish"). Earth's largest creatures appear in the book of Jonah (of getting-swallowed-by-a-whale fame) and Job, for example.
The ocean has always been a place of great mystery, and the fact that it can hold such immensely large animals—living their whale lives far away from humankind—has always been of interest in literature. Herman Melville's Moby-Dick is perhaps the most obvious example, while D.H. Lawrence's "Whales Weep Not!" is a much more flamboyant poetic take on the same creature.
There are countless poems about the animal kingdom, and plenty that also see the animal kingdom and/or the ocean as a potential source of—and metaphor for—creative inspiration. The whales provide the speaker with a moment of contemplation in an otherwise hectic world (indeed, the boat launched from one of the most tourist-packed places in the U.S.!). With this in mind, one interesting poet for comparison is Elizabeth Bishop; check out "The Fish" and "The Moose" for starters. "The Thought-Fox" by Ted Hughes is also relevant here, as a poem that more explicitly links animals and creativity.
Historical Context
"Cetacean" is a contemporary poem. The speaker, possibly a tourist, takes a boat trip from Fisherman's Wharf—a touristy waterside area in San Francisco (from which trips to Alcatraz Island are another popular attraction).
Blue whales have long fascinated humankind, though the nature of this interest has changed over time. The blue whale is famously the largest creature on earth, sometimes growing to up to 100 feet in length and 200 tons in weight. Its heart alone can weigh as much as a car!
The speaker carefully describes the different parts of these animals, beginning the poem with a word straight from the lexicon of scientific classification. Dolphins and porpoises are also types of cetacean.
Though the blue whale has always been a kind of ambassador for the weird and wonderful things living under the ocean's surface, it was hunted voraciously by humankind throughout the early-to-mid 20th century. Around 360,000 were slaughtered before the 1966 International Whaling Commission outlawed the practice. The pursuit of whales, primarily for their oil, features prominently in Herman Melville's Moby-Dick.
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More “Cetacean” Resources
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External Resources
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The Poet's Voice — Peter Reading reads a selection of his poems.
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Reading's Obituary — An overview of Reading's life from The Guardian.
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The Blue Whale — Pictures and facts about the earth's largest creature.
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Reading's Collected Poems — A review of Reading's third volume of collected poetry.
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Whales on Film — Check out some incredible footage from the BBC.
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