Whales
Write the largest heartbeat on Earth without drowning the poem in scale.
Quick answer: Learn to write poems about whales: ocean imagery, craft techniques, common mistakes, exercises and prompts, all in this free Writory guide for every poet.
What this theme is
Whales hand the poet an impossible gift: a warm-blooded creature the size of a building, singing in the dark. The theme is really about scale and kinship at once. A whale is unimaginably other, living at pressures that would crush us, yet it breathes air, nurses its young and calls across whole oceans to its own kind. Whale poems live in that overlap, where the alien turns out to be family.
The theme also carries a modern grief. We hunted whales close to extinction inside living memory, lighting our cities with their oil, and then discovered, almost too late, that they sing. Any contemporary whale poem is written after that discovery and after that guilt, whether or not it mentions either. The water the poem swims in is already historical.
Why poets return to it
Poets choose whales when they want to write about the sublime without leaving the body: unlike a mountain, a whale can look back at you. The theme suits poems about awe, deep time, motherhood, migration, and the limits of human knowing, since most of a whale's life happens where we cannot follow.
There is also a formal temptation worth accepting: the long breath. Whale poems often stretch their lines, dive and surface, hold and release, so the very shape of the poem starts to breathe like its subject.
Where it comes from
Old English monks imagined the whale as an island that sailors mistakenly camped on, a sermon about deception the size of a reef. Melville built a whole cathedral of prose around the sperm whale, and poetry has been answering him since. D. H. Lawrence insisted that whales love in the deep, writing their passion as vast and unashamed, while Stanley Kunitz addressed a beached, dying sperm whale directly, mourning it as an ambassador from a world we ruined before we understood it.
The recordings of humpback song released in 1970 changed the theme overnight. Once the world heard those long, structured, grieving phrases, the whale in poetry stopped being a monster or a resource and became a fellow musician.
The elements that carry it
- Breath made visible: the blow on the horizon, the held plunge, the gasp of surfacing, breath as drama and as form.
- The barnacled body, scarred flukes and calloused skin, gives texture to what would otherwise be pure silhouette.
- Song and echo, calls travelling for hundreds of miles through lightless water, suit poems about distance and longing.
- Vertical space: the sunlit surface and the crushing dark below offer a ready-made architecture of two worlds.
- Human debris, harpoons, shipping lanes, sonar, plastic, lets the poem carry history without a lecture.
Techniques that work
- Anchor scale in one graspable comparison, a heart the size of a small car, a tongue heavier than an elephant, then stop; one true measurement outweighs ten gestures at vastness.
- Shape your lines like breathing: long submerged sentences, then a short surfacing line, so the reader's own lungs learn the rhythm.
- Try direct address. Speaking to the whale, as Kunitz did, converts spectacle into relationship and forces the poem to decide what it wants to say.
- Write the sound world honestly: underwater there is no silence, so give the poem clicks, moans, hull-thrum and the wash of krill-rich currents.
- Let the whale stay partly unknown. The poem gains power from what it admits it cannot see, the dive that ends the encounter.
Mistakes to avoid
- Gentle-giant sentimentality. Whales are not floating saints; a bull sperm whale is a predator that battles squid in the dark. Complexity is more moving than purity.
- Vagueness disguised as awe: majestic, magnificent, enormous. Cut every one and replace it with a measurement, a texture or an act.
- Turning the poem into an environmental pamphlet. Grief lands harder through one beached body than through statistics.
- Forgetting the medium. A whale poem set in generic “ocean” wastes the theme's best gift, the specific physics of pressure, salt, echo and cold.
An exercise
Write a poem of exactly ten lines describing a whale sounding: five lines above the surface, five below. Let the language itself change at the waterline, in speed, in vocabulary, in sound.
A challenge
Spend a week writing one couplet per day in the voice of a listening whale, each couplet responding to a different human noise: a ferry, sonar, a swimmer, rain on the surface, silence. Then arrange the couplets into one poem.
A prompt to start from
Write a poem about a whale skeleton hanging in a museum, and the moment a child standing under the ribcage asks a question nobody in the room can answer.
Before you submit
- No use of “majestic” or “magnificent” anywhere in the draft.
- At least one exact, physical detail of whale biology or behaviour.
- The line lengths or stanza breaks do some breathing work.
- Human history, hunting, shipping or song-recordings is present or deliberately excluded, not merely forgotten.
- The ending preserves some mystery below the surface.
By the Writory editorial team, reviewed by working poets. Updated July 2026.
Enter a Writory poetry contest
Enter the September contest and have your own poem read and scored. That first entry makes you a Writorian.