I greet you, O vast and indifferent Ocean—not because you are beautiful, for beauty is a lie told by the weak, but because you are a boiling cauldron of salt and silence. You swallow the armadas of men as easily as a toad gulps a fly, and in your "aquatic entrails," the fish laugh at the drowning sailors who once claimed to be your masters.
The book, originally published in 1868, is famous for its "black humor," blasphemy, and the iconic imagery of Maldoror's rebellion against God and humanity. The Hymn of the Carrion-Sky Songs of Maldoror
I have seen the female shark in the wake of the shipwreck, her fins cutting the water like a guillotine through silk, and I have found in her the only embrace that does not taste of betrayal. We shall couple beneath the foam, a union of scales and scars, while the stars above—those "hypocritical eyes" of the firmament—watch in frozen horror. I greet you, O vast and indifferent Ocean—not
Translator R.J. Dent: "You Don't Find Maldoror—It ... - LitReactor The Hymn of the Carrion-Sky I have seen