An Ode on a Blobfish

Prema Arasu

Thou ravish’d bride of deep-sea trawlers—
Thou foster-child of timeless deeps,
Abyssal historian, canst thus suffer
                Thy ancient, dreamless, uninvaded sleep.
Fishermen rejoice upon thy sacrifice 
From Antipodean depths, untimely ripp’d—
From thy diatomaceous womb 
To what bright altar, O inchoate priest
Lead’st thou to thy sunlit crypt—
Where roaring waves shall be thy tomb?

O gelatinous shape! O Psychrolutes marcidus! 
Of mucilaginous flesh borne from the sea,
Were I anointed with thy palest blood, 
Flayed and desecrated at thy lea— 
Were I dragged to thy Hadal home to partake
in salt’d communion at thy benthic cradle, 
Thou and I would be cold sea foam. 
Thou art a friend, to whom we say’st,
“Hideousness is a lie, lies hideousness,—that is all
We know on land, and all we need to know.” 

The Science

This poem is a eulogy to the blobfish (Psychrolutes spp.), voted the world’s ugliest animal in a poll by the Ugly Animal Preservation Society. The blobfish is well-known because of a widely distributed photograph of a trawled specimen that has decompressed, melted, and been dragged across the seafloor. In situ, they look more like regular bony fish with rounded heads. The poem mourns the anthropogenic desecration of the blobfish and laments how anthropocentric configurations of beauty determine the value we ascribe to the deep-sea and its inhabitants. The title and structure take inspiration from John Keats’ ekphrasis ‘Ode on a Grecian Urn’, which Romantic scholars consider to be a seminal text in aesthetic theory due to its reveries of truth and beauty.

The Poet

Dr Prema Arasu (they/she) has a PhD in creative writing and is a postdoctoral research fellow at the Minderoo-UWA Deep-Sea Research Centre. As a poet and writer on a seagoing marine science team, Prema utilises creative and critical methodologies to engage with deep-sea research from its frontiers. They have been published by Westerly, Fantastika, and in Bloomsbury’s recent anthology Fantasy and Myth in the Anthropocene: Imagining Futures and Dreaming Hope in Literature and Media.

Next poem: can the sea drown? by Hannele Luhtasela