Skull Song

^{A sea-god, whose father had been a mortal, becomes a skeleton.}

The skin of the sea was thick, to-night,
And the tone of the sea was dull;
When I found by the edge of the sullen sea
The half of a sea-god’s skull.

Half of a sea-god’s skull was there,
Half of a sea-god’s tail.
When I dug them out of the clutch of the sand
The peering moon went pale.

The peering moon went pale, because
Her other eye had seen
The other half of the sea-god’s bones
Ten thousand fathom green . . .

Ten thousand fathom green with sea,
The sea-god’s other bones
Swayed in a dead sea-goddess’s arms
On a pile of sea-washed stones.

The skin of the sea was thick, to-night,
And the tone of the sea was dull,
While I buried away from the sinister sea
All the mortal part of a skull.

This poem is in the public domain. Published in Poem-a-Day on August 6, 2023, by the Academy of American Poets.

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“Skull Song” first appeared in a 1918 issue of The Occident, and later again in Genevieve Taggard’s collection Hawaiian Hilltop (Wyckoff & Gelber, 1923). In “Genevieve Taggard: The Hawaiian Background to a Radical Poet,” published in The Hawaiian Journal of History, vol. 49 (2015), Anne Hammond, visiting research fellow at the University of the West of England, writes that “her early lyrical style embraces a popular poetic form of the turn of the century, the ballad [. . .]. The form of the poem, with its stanzas of internally rhyming quatrains and phrase repetitions, is reminiscent of Robert Louis Stevenson’s Penny Whistles, or A Child’s Garden of Verses, and [Rudyard] Kipling’s The Seven Seas, and derives its narrative from the storytelling traditions of the previous century. [. . .] [B]eyond the romantic mythological tone of ‘Skull Song,’ the imagery (possibly stimulated by her undergraduate exposure to the works of Sigmund Freud) of the ‘half of a sea-god’s skull’ and ‘half of a sea-god’s tail’ suggests the separation of the psychological from the physical existence, in ‘the sinister sea’ of the chaotic and disintegrated life of modern man. It represents, perhaps, the split consciousness of the writer, and the mortal part of the skull safely buried at the end of the poem may reflect the poet’s conscious struggle to suppress nostalgic memories of her childhood [in Hawaii].”