The Tail — Moby-Dick

Other poets warble antelope eyes and birds that never alight; Ishmael, less celestial, celebrates the sperm whale's tail, beginning where the trunk narrows to a man's girth with fifty square feet on the upper surface alone, flukes like winged palms shoaling to an inch, crescent borders unmatched in living line, twenty feet across at full spread, a triune bed of sinews whose crosswise middle stratum rivals Roman tile courses and whose fibres from loins and body converge so all Leviathan's measureless force meets at one point that could annihilate matter yet flex with infant ease through Titan power, real strength bestowing harmony as in carved Hercules or Goethe's arch of chest.

Five motions define it: horizontal scroll-coil propulsion without the wriggle that marks inferior fish; mace blows against men while jaw fights jaw among rivals, recoil from curving flukes crushing ribs unless eluded or softened by side blows through water; sweeping touch delicate as an elephant's trunk, a whisker enough to doom the sailor; lobtailing play that thunder-smites the sea like artillery; peaking flukes before the plunge, thirty feet of body aloft in perhaps the grandest sight short of the breach, herds once vibrating peaked flukes toward sunrise like Persian fire-worship until Ishmael pronounces the whale most devout.

Elephant comparisons fail: the mightiest pachyderm is a terrier to Leviathan, trunk a lily-stalk to these flukes that toss boats like juggler's balls; mystic herd gestures hint Masonic signs, yet dissection leaves him skin-deep, tail unknown, head incomprehensible, face denied though promised, back parts still unreadable when the whale seems to say thou shalt see my tail but not my face.