Great Regulars: Who could forget the opening scene of

Steven Spielberg's film Jaws, where a lone swimmer is dragged beneath the waves to John Williams's spine-chilling musical score? Yet when Melville takes us down to the bottom of the sea to view this monster from the safety of our imagination, we see something quite different. To our surprise, the lean, mean killing machine turns out to be a "phlegmatical," "pale sot."

To be phlegmatic denotes a slow, stolid temperament: in some people an enlightened temperance, in others mere doltishness. The phrase "pale sot" makes the shark sound like an ashen-faced drunkard on the point of collapsing in a heap.

from Christopher Nield: The Epoch Times: The Antidote--Classic Poetry for Modern Life: A Reading of the 'The Maldive Shark' by Herman Melville

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