Moby Dick or The Whale / Моби Дик или Белый кит

“Which to secure, no skill of leach’s art

Mote him availle, but to returne againe

To his wound’s worker, that with lowly dart,

Dinting his breast, had bred his restless paine,

Like as the wounded whale to shore flies thro’ the maine.”

    – The Fairie Queen.

“Immense as whales, the motion of whose vast bodies can in a peaceful calm trouble the ocean till it boil.” – Sir William Davenant. Preface to Gondibert.

“What spermacetti is, men might justly doubt, since the learned Hosmannus in his work of thirty years, saith plainly, Nescio quid sit.

“Like Spencer’s Talus with his modern flail

He threatens ruin with his ponderous tail.

…

Their fixed jav’lins in his side he wears,

And on his back a grove of pikes appears.”

    – Waller’s Battle of the Summer Islands.

“By art is created that great Leviathan, called a Commonwealth or State- (in Latin, Civitas) which is but an artificial man.

“Silly Mansoul swallowed it without chewing, as if it had been a sprat in the mouth of a whale.” – Pilgrim’s Progress.

“That sea beast

Leviathan, which God of all his works

Created hugest that swim the ocean stream.”

    – Paradise Lost.

– “There Leviathan,

Hugest of living creatures, in the deep

Stretched like a promontory sleeps or swims,

And seems a moving land; and at his gills

Draws in, and at his breath spouts out a sea.

    – Ibid.

“The mighty whales which swim in a sea of water, and have a sea of oil swimming in them.” – Fuller’s Profane and Holy State.

“So close behind some promontory lie

The huge Leviathan to attend their prey,

And give no chance, but swallow in the fry,

Which through their gaping jaws mistake the way.”

    – Dryden’s Annus Mirabilis.

“While the whale is floating at the stern of the ship, they cut off his head, and tow it with a boat as near the shore as it will come; but it will be aground in twelve or thirteen feet water.

“In their way they saw many whales sporting in the ocean, and in wantonness fuzzing up the water through their pipes and vents, which nature has placed on their shoulders.” – Sir T. Herbert’s Voyages into Asia and Africa. Harris Coll.