Leviathan

Leviathan is the greatest marine creature named in the poem, a figure whose immense body links the monstrous imagination of Hell with the ordered plenitude of Creation. First evoked as a comparison for Satan’s fallen bulk, Leviathan later appears as the largest living creature generated by the waters, transforming an emblem of cosmic fear into a sign of created magnitude under God’s providence.

Infernal Image and Scale

Leviathan first enters the poem through Satan’s enormous body on the Lake of Fire. Satan lies stretched across the burning flood, so vast that the narrator compares him with legendary giants and colossal beings, including Leviathan, described as the hugest of all creatures that swim the ocean. The comparison establishes scale through a chain of impossible bodies: the Arch-fiend is measured against Titans, Earth-born monsters, and the greatest beast of the sea rather than against any ordinary creature.

The image becomes especially vivid through the mariner’s mistake. A small night-farered skiff may take the sleeping Leviathan for an island and anchor beside its scaly hide, sheltered under its lee while darkness covers the sea and morning is delayed. Leviathan therefore occupies an unstable boundary between animal and landscape. Its body is not merely large; it is geographically deceptive, capable of turning a living creature into a seeming territory and reducing human navigation to helpless misrecognition.

Creature of the Created Waters

Leviathan’s second appearance belongs to the fifth day of Creation, when God commands the waters to generate living creatures in abundance. The seas, creeks, and bays swarm with fish, while shoals glide beneath the green waves, feed among seaweed and coral, and display shining scales and pearl-like shells. Within this profusion, Leviathan retains singular prominence: it is the greatest of living creatures, stretched across the deep like a promontory or swimming as though it were moving land.

Its scale is rendered through physical action rather than a bare epithet. Leviathan sleeps or swims across the deep, draws water in at its gills, and spouts a sea from its trunk. The creature’s body seems to make and remake the surrounding marine world: what appears to be land is in motion, and what seems to be a beast carries enough force to project the sea outward. Yet this power is not presented as a rival creation. Leviathan belongs to the waters that God has filled and to the living order that God has judged good.

Contrast Between Terror and Order

The two descriptions produce a deliberate contrast. In the infernal scene, Leviathan functions as an imaginative measure of Satan’s monstrous magnitude, contributing to a landscape of fire, darkness, and cosmic displacement. In the Creation scene, the same creature is situated among the reproductive abundance of the waters and within the blessing that living creatures should multiply. Its immensity remains, but its meaning changes from threatening comparison to fulfilled natural order.

This contrast does not make Leviathan small or tame. The creature continues to exceed ordinary human comprehension, and its apparent transformation into a moving land preserves the sublime uncertainty associated with its first mention. What changes is not its physical grandeur but the frame that contains it. Hell deploys its image to express rebellion and ruin; Creation places it within divine command, fecundity, and the abundance of life.

Narrative and Thematic Significance

Leviathan occupies only brief passages, but those passages make it a powerful scale-marker. It allows the poem to move from the measurements of a fallen angel to the immensity of the ocean, then from the frightening singularity of the sea beast to the innumerable life generated on the fifth day. The creature consequently mediates between the knowable and the immeasurable: it is described through recognizable actions—sleeping, swimming, breathing, and spouting—while remaining too vast to fit comfortably within human categories of animal or place.

Its recurrence also supports the poem’s larger contrast between destructive and creative power. Satan’s bulk lies chained upon the burning lake until divine permission leaves him free to pursue his designs; Leviathan, by contrast, belongs to the living waters that answer God’s command. The same language of enormity can therefore serve opposing structures. In one setting, magnitude intensifies the horror of revolt; in the other, it enlarges the spectacle of a world whose abundance extends from innumerable shoals and birds to a creature that resembles a moving continent.