I: Introduction
In the Wake of Poseidon is King Crimson‘s second studio album, released in 1970. It came into being during a period of great instability in the band, since founding members Ian McDonald (alto sax, flute, clarinet, Mellotron, vibraphone, and backing vocals) and drummer Michael Giles quit after the band’s American tour. To make matters worse, lead singer/bassist Greg Lake would also leave, during the recording sessions of Poseidon, to cofound ELP.
Though the album was well-received by critics upon its release, citing the execution and production quality as better than its predecessor, Poseidon has since been regarded as something of a mere copy of In the Court of the Crimson King. Indeed, apart from “Peace–A Beginning,” all the tracks from Side One of Poseidon are parallels of those on Side One of the first album. Furthermore, on Side Two of Poseidon, towards the end of “The Devil’s Triangle,” there’s a clip from the title track of the previous album, the “Ah…ah, ah-ah, ah, ah-ah” vocals.
Still, in spite of what would seem legitimate criticisms of this reworking of the first album in the way guitarist/leader Robert Fripp would have had it, I’ve always preferred Poseidon to Crimson King: I find this second album to be bolder and more colourful than the first (though I consider the lyrics of the first album to be preferable overall to the obscurantism of those of the second). In an attempt to rationalize this ‘redoing’ of the first album, I’d say that Poseidon can be seen as the ‘epitaph,’ if you will, of Crimson King, a kind of ‘lament’ over the demise of the great original lineup.
Here is a link to all the album’s lyrics, and here is a link to all the tracks from the album, including the shorter single version of “Cat Food,” “Groon” (the B-side of the “Cat Food” single), and Greg Lake’s guide-vocal version of “Cadence and Cascade”.
Apart from the links to the first album that I’ve noted above, the second album has other links to the original lineup. Giles was retained as a ‘guest drummer’ for Poseidon, and two of its tracks are based on music the original band played live: “Pictures of a City” is based on “A Man, a City,” and “The Devil’s Triangle” is based on “Mars,” an instrumental improvisation based in turn on “Mars, the Bringer of War,” from Gustav Holst‘s The Planets.
In fact, as noted above, Lake even recorded a ‘guide vocal’ for “Cadence and Cascade” in an uncharacteristically unexpressive voice; not to bad-mouth replacement singer Gordon Haskell for his excellent performance on the recording used on Poseidon, but if Lake was available to sing the track, why didn’t he do so with his usual expressivity, then Haskell could have debuted on bass and vocals for Lizard?
Many of the themes of the first album are repeated here on the second: the horrors of war, modern alienation, capitalism, political corruption, and fear of the end of the world. The theme of modern alienation is in abundant supply in “Pictures of a City,” this album’s counterpart to “21st Century Schizoid Man.”
But as a sharp contrast to all of this negativity, remaining original members Fripp and lyricist Peter Sinfield gave us a trilogy of tracks on the ideal of peace. Of course, this ideal can never be realized if the issues of the preceding paragraph are not dealt with, but it’s good to be reminded of peace as a goal worth striving for, on three occasions spread out over the course of the album.
II: Peace–A Beginning
“Peace–A Beginning” opens with heavy reverb that will die out slowly over the course of the short track. Lake is singing a cappella in C minor. The four-line verse he sings makes references, however indirectly, to the four elements: air (“the wind”), fire (“lit by the flame”), earth (“the mountain”), and water (“the ocean” and “the river”); these are all identified with a personified peace.
Such basic, fundamental elements point in the direction of unity and permanence, which is fitting, given that peace will “never end.” It’s also fitting that there are two references to water, rather than just one; one of these is the ocean, appropriate for an album called In the Wake of Poseidon, the title track of which will deal more with the four elements.
When Lake sings the last word, we can hear Fripp softly play four notes on his guitar: A, F-sharp, C, and A-sharp. Then we go into the next song.
III: Pictures of a City
Since this song is Poseidon‘s equivalent of “21st Century Schizoid Man,” it’s fitting that we hear saxophones in it, played by McDonald’s replacement, saxist/flautist Mel Collins. His jazzy playing of the saxes reinforces the contemporary urban feel of the song. The band is playing in G minor, in a kind of twelve-bar blues before the first verse.
Rather than present any kind of narrative, Sinfield just gives us a series of urban images, true to the title of the song, as well as the sounds of the city, and the feelings that result from such sights and sounds.
“Concrete” gives us a “cold face,” leaving us “stark sharp” and “glass eyed,” lacking expression. Such are the alienating effects of modern urban life: removed from nature, with the city’s polluted air, fire breathing out smoke from cars’ exhaust pipes, earth covered up and suffocated, if you will, under concrete, and water made filthy through sewage, we’re also disconnected from community. The contaminating of the four elements means there can be no peace.
There’s a considerable amount of internal rhyme and assonance in these verses: “face cased,” “stark sharp,” “bright light scream beam,” “neon wheel,” “spice ice dance chance,” “mouth dry tongue tied.”
The third line of the first verse vividly portrays the problems of driving in the big city: road rage, screeching brakes, the honking of horns, and car accidents. Never mind wars between nations–one often finds oneself in a kind of war just by driving in a busy city.
The white of “red white green white” suggests light, like that of the “neon wheel.” Note the red and green of traffic lights, fittingly mentioned right after the “brake and squeal” of impatient drivers. Note also the absence of the yellow traffic light: one hurries up and waits, but never drives slowly.
After the first verse, we return to the jazzy twelve-bar blues riff of the harmonized saxes and guitar. City life sure can give you the blues.
Much of the imagery of the second verse, especially its first line, suggests how urban alienation leads to a desperate attempt to connect with others by looking for love in all the wrong places: “Dream flesh love chase perfumed skin.” There are other “tinseled sin[s]” going on, though. There’s the “greased hand” of political corruption and bribery. One’s teeth one ought to hide so the people we’re cheating don’t know of one’s wicked motives. “Pasteboard time slot sweat and spin” suggests the daily grind of the nine-to-five job, or wage slavery under capitalism.
This verse ends with Fripp playing a chromatic ascension of high notes going up to A-sharp, which leads into “42nd at Treadmills,” the fast middle-section equivalent of “Mirrors,” from “21st Century Schizoid Man.” Since this song is about the immorality of the city, I can interpret “Treadmill” in terms of its old use as a punishment for prisoners in the UK and US of the 19th century, used to exert labour from them, an effective metaphor for wage slavery. “42nd” suggests a doubling of the evil of “21st” from the original song.
Like “Mirrors,” “42nd at Treadmill” is essentially in a 12-bar blues structure (a cycle of four bars of the tonic chord, two of the subdominant chord, two of the tonic again, two of the dominant chord, and two again of the tonic). In fact, much of this section is simply a sped-up version of the 12-bar blues riff heard before each of the first two verses.
After this comes a soft, slow variation on the 12-bar blues structure, suggesting the night time and everyone having gone to sleep…though since this song was initially inspired by New York City, ‘the city that never sleeps,’ during King Crimson’s American tour of late 1969 and early 1970, perhaps we should imagine people tossing and turning in their beds, especially at this section’s dissonant ending, which suggests the morning and therefore the need to wake up and face yet another grueling work day.
With the final verse, instead of getting images of city life, we get what is largely the effect of city life on its residents–the alienation, brokenness, and blindness of those without political or class consciousness. Blinded by drunkenness and aimless partying, these people can’t communicate or see their reality for what it is. They’re doomed in an industrialized, urban hell.
The song ends with that chromatic ascension of high notes on Fripp’s guitar, but this time ending on B and introducing a chaotic, dissonant ending like the one for “21st Century Schizoid Man,” though I find this one to be far darker, and therefore better, than the first one. Also, you can hear in this one Fripp’s signature screaming guitar phrases, in which he quickly strums dissonant, high-pitched chords like the splintery ones you hear on “Sailor’s Tale.”
IV: Cadence and Cascade
This song is Poseidon’s equivalent to “I Talk to the Wind.” It features Fripp’s lyrical acoustic guitar playing, Haskell’s lead vocal as mentioned above, and some lovely flute solos by Collins. The song is in E major, Fripp opening with combinations of single notes, strums, and arpeggios in the tonic chord, an A-major chord, an E-major 7th chord, and A major again.
Haskell’s singing introduces two groupies, Cadence and Cascade, and the man they’re interested in, Jade, who depending on the interpretation of Sinfield’s lyric is variously portrayed as, for example, a singer, or a Silk Road merchant trading goods from the Far East. The names “Cadence and Cascade” suggest the two women’s beauty (more on the meanings of their names later); “Jade” suggests his wealth.
The women worship him for his wealth, power, and fame, but grow disappointed with him as they get to know him better: “As his veil fell aside…They found him just a man.” His phony appeal is comparable to that of a prostitute: “Sad paper courtesan.”
In the world of traditional sex roles, which still largely existed in the West as of 1970, women found their only option for gaining wealth and social status was through a man, so when they met a rich and powerful man, they idealized him…only to find later that he is just as faulty as any other man of modest means. Masculinity is an ideal that is rarely, if ever, even approached, let alone attained.
The bridge opens with Fripp playing one of his “devices,” a celeste, with an ascension of notes: B, C-sharp, E, F-sharp, and G-sharp; this is heard over an A major seventh chord, then with the switch to an A minor seventh chord, we hear celeste notes of G-sharp, A, B, C, and D, E, and F-sharp. We also hear Keith Tippett‘s jazzy piano in the background.
The verse of the bridge has Haskell singing about the lovemaking between the groupies and Jade, their worshipping of his wealth (“sequin,” and “velvet-gloved hand”) and fame (“Cascade kissed his name”). In a larger sense, the groupies’ worship of Jade can represent the idolatry of famous people in general, and the simping for billionaires. This applies to men and women, as worshippers and worshipped.
After the first flute solo, we hear a refrain of the “sad paper courtesan” verse, except that Cadence and Cascade now “knew [Jade] just a man” (my emphasis). The groupies have left him behind in their disappointment in him.
One of the biggest problems in our world is that, because of the worship of fame, wealth, status, and power, people keep aspiring to it, instead of sharing everything so that the basic needs of everyone are met. We aim for these heights, then in disappointment we fall…which leads me to my next point.
Apart from the groupies’ names suggesting their beauty, “Cadence and Cascade”–something Haskell sings several times leading into Collins’s second flute solo–are also words coming from the Latin world cadere, meaning “to fall.” There’s the musical cadence of resolving a harmonic progression back to the tonic, and a cascade is a waterfall (the element of water again, as jade is associated with the element of earth). Both meanings suggest musical or natural beauty, or the beauty of a woman’s cascade of long, wavy hair flowing down to her shoulders. There’s also the fall of the girls’ disappointment on knowing Jade is “just a man.”
V: In the Wake of Poseidon (including “Libra’s Theme”)
This track reworks the first album in two ways: the title, of course, parallels that of the last song on Side Two of the first album; more properly, though, this song is a reworking of “Epitaph,” the last song on Side One of the first album.
Sinfield apparently rewrote the lyric to this song about twenty-five times to make it tie in with the cover art, which therefore should be discussed now. I’ll describe each of the dozen faces not as they appear on the outer album cover–which shows a painting called The 12 Archetypes, or The 12 Faces of Humankind, by Tammo de Jongh–but in order of appearance as Sinfield brings them up in his lyric.
The Observer, a bald old man with spectacles up above his brow and his hand on his chin, looks pensive and scientifically-minded. His elements are Air and Earth. The opening lines, “Plato’s spawn cold ivied eyes/Snare truth in bone and globe,” refer to him. He represents Western science in the service of cold-blooded imperialism, taking over the globe and, exploiting it, reducing all indigenous resistance to skulls and bones.
The Joker, a harlequin painted in reds and yellows and smiling in a triangular hat, is the subject of the next two lines of the first verse. His elements being Fire and Air, he’d “coin pointless games/Sneer jokes in parrot’s robe.” His sardonic humor points out our everyday foibles and political corruption, but it’s “pointless” in how it does nothing to solve our problems.
The Actress is next. She’s Egyptian, with long pearl earrings and necklaces, and with tears running down her cheeks. Her elements are Water and Fire. She is represented in the lines, “Dame Scarlet Queen/Sheds sudden theatre rain.” She weeps for the sins of the world, as does…
…The Enchantress, her long dark hair going across her face. She has Water and Earth as her elements. She “knows every human pain.”
As I said above, the title track is especially concerned with the four elements, two of which are associated with each of the twelve archetypes, as we’ve seen and will continue to see. All four are also heard twice in the next verse, a bridge between the first and third verses, this latter continuing to depict the twelve archetypal faces.
Though the elements are associated with peace, as we saw in “Peace–A Beginning,” the “World [is] on the scales,” with war and destruction on one scale, balanced on the other with peace and its four elements. This “Balance of change” means the world is teetering “on the scales” between peace and war. Which side will win? Which will outweigh the other? Will it be the side that wants peace and justice for everyone, or will it be the side of the imperialistic warmongers, whose recklessness is pushing us all ever closer to nuclear armageddon?
This song, and therefore the entire album, has as much relevance for us today as it did back in 1970, with its Cold War fears of nuclear annihilation between the US/NATO and the USSR. We’re experiencing a new, and utterly needless, new Cold War between the Western, NATO-allied powers on one side, and Russia, China, the DPRK, and Iran on the other. Between the two sides are thousands of nuclear weapons, and no attempt at détente is even being considered.
To return to the archetypes, the next one is The Patriarch, an old philosopher with long white hair and a beard. He’s frowning, with a furrowed brow. Surrounding him are such shapes as flowers and snowflakes. His elements are Air and Water. Referring to him are the lines, “Bishop’s kings spin judgement’s blade/Scratch ‘Faith’ on nameless graves.” The Church controls the heads of state–The Patriarch being one of these stern religious leaders–and it pushes the kings to fight ‘holy’ wars. (One might think of the Archbishop of Canterbury and Bishop of Ely persuading Henry V to invade France.)
The Old Woman would “hoard ash and sand.” She has a wrinkled, sad face, and her hair is wrapped in white. Her elements are Earth and Air. Such women are “Harvest hags,” peasant farmers, whom we associate with the working class, yet these peasants are betraying the fellow proletarians in that they “rack rope and chain for slaves,” the next archetype to be discussed.
The Slave, a black African with earrings and a nose-ring, has Earth and Fire as her elements. The slaves “fear fermented words,” that is, they’re scared of revolution, and like the kulaks who hoarded grain during the famine in the USSR in the early 1930s, they “rear to spoil the feast.” This lack of solidarity among the poor is what allows the rich to stay in power.
The Fool, the laughing man to the centre-left of the front cover of the album, with the pink face, the blond beard, and the flowers in his hair, is “the mad man [who] smiles/To him it matters least.” In his foolish, delusional state, he doesn’t care about the corruption in the world, because like The Slave and the Old Woman, he has no class consciousness. His elements are Fire and Water.
After this verse is an instrumental passage that includes the (Libra’s?) theme (“Air, fire, earth, and water”), only it’s played by Fripp on the Mellotron instead of sung by Lake. I suspect that part of the reason this song is called “In the Wake of Poseidon” is that the god of sea and earthquakes best represents all four elements: the earth and water aspects hardly need to be elaborated on; air can be included in its being blown as wind over the sea, making waves, and Poseidon is known for his fiery temper–consider how he treated Odysseus after he blinded the god’s cyclopean son, Polyphemus. I’m assuming this section is “Libra’s Theme,” given our “world on the scales.”
To go back to the archetypal faces, the next one is The Warrior, wearing a steel helmet and a full black beard, and baring his teeth, ready to fight. His elements are Fire and Earth, and he’s represented in these lines: “Heroes’ hands drain stones for blood/To whet the scaling knife.” The weapons of war wound not only bodies, but the Earth as well.
Next comes The Logician, a wizard with dark hair and a long dark beard. He’s holding a wand in one hand while the other is held up high. There are stars all around him, presumably the magic from one of his spells. He’s represented with the lines, “Magi blind with visions light/Net death in dread of life.” He represents the theologian or philosopher who is ‘blinded by the light’ of his own dogma, preferring death and the peace of a presumed heaven over the pain of living here.
The naïve sheep of these religious shepherds are represented in The Child, a girl with long blonde hair and a face of sweet innocence. The necklace she’s wearing has a white key on it. Her elements are Water and Air, and these lines represent her in the song: “Their children kneel in Jesus’ till/They learn the price of nails.” To enter the Kingdom of Heaven, one must be as a child (Luke 18:17); hence, the key on The Child’s necklace (Matthew 16:19). Still, learning “the price of nails” means learning either to submit to the powers-that-be, whether they’re religious or political, or to suffer as Jesus did for defying them.
And the last archetype is The Mother Earth, or Mother Nature. We see her lying asleep in the grass in left profile, with dark skin and flowers and butterflies all around her. Her elements are Earth and Water, and the last two lines of the song refer to her: “Whilst all around our Mother Earth/Waits balanced on the scales.” Our Earth sits passively as mankind decides the fate of all living creatures who have her as their home: nuclear war, or peace? A healthy planet, or ecocide? Our collective fate is being weighed in the balance, “on the scales,” by psychopathic leaders who care about wealth and maintaining their power, and not about us.
To understand the deeper meaning of archetypes, one must look into analytical psychology, Jung‘s offshoot from Freudian psychoanalysis. Jungian psychology has a grounding in such psychoanalytical concepts as the unconscious and repression, but unlike Freud the atheist, Jung developed an interest in myth, mysticism, and religion far beyond just their psychological symbolism. As a result, he broke with Freud, who would later speak derisively of Jung as one who would “aspire to be a prophet” (Freud, page 280).
The archetypes are characters that reside in the collective unconscious, that aspect of the unconscious we all share and that has been inherited throughout human history. These include the Sage (which can find its equivalent in the song and album cover as The Patriarch), Innocent (The Child), Hero (Warrior), Magician (Logician), Jester (Joker), and Creator or Caregiver (The Mother Earth). The point is that we have all of these characters, hidden deep down in our unconscious; they influence how we think and interact in the world. To this extent, they control us, and therefore control mankind’s collective fate.
In this song, we can see how unhappy these twelve are, or how manipulative (or manipulated) they are. They’re in the depths of the ocean of the collective unconscious, so “the wake of Poseidon” is, literally speaking, the making conscious all of these characters that reside deep within the sea-god’s realm. If we can make their sorrow conscious, we can integrate them, become whole and healthy, then work to save our planet from ecocide and nuclear annihilation. Hence, the deep relevance of this song back in 1970 and, even more, today.
VI: Peace–A Theme
This is a short instrumental for solo acoustic guitar, about a minute long, in A major.
Fripp plays the melody Lake sang a cappella on “Peace–A Beginning,” as well as the bridge melody (“Searching for…, etc.) that we will hear on “Peace–An End.” Fripp opens with a strum of an open A major chord with an added sixth.
From this chord, he embellishes the melody Lake sang before with an appoggiatura: he does a hammer-on and a pull-off as part of the continuing melody with E, F-sharp, E, and D-flat. Then, he strums a D-flat minor 7th chord, and single notes D-flat and E, then a hammer-on to F-sharp, and a strum of a D-major 7th chord, the E, D-flat, and an A major chord, with a high note of D-flat.
Next, he strums the D-major 7th chord, and plays the above appoggiatura with the E, F-sharp, E, and D-flat. Then, there’s the strum of the D-flat minor 7th chord again, then a strum of an E dominant 9th chord, then a strum of a D major 6/9 chord, and an ending of the melody that includes another appoggiatura, a hammer-on and pull-off of F-sharp, A, F-sharp, and E, then the D-major 7th chord again.
All of the above is repeated, then we come to the bridge (“Searching for…,” etc., in “Peace–An End”). Fripp strums an A-major chord, then an A chord with a major second instead of a major third, then the A major six chord again. Then he plays arpeggiated chords of D-flat suspension 4th and a D-flat major. Next, a melody of F-sharp, A, B, D-sharp, E, D-sharp, B, G-sharp, and F-sharp is played over chords of D-major 7th, D-flat minor, and D-major 7th again.
After an E suspension 4th chord and an E major chord in the dominant, Fripp repeats the bridge section as described in the previous paragraph, but he ends the piece with a strum of an A 6/9 chord, only without a third, and with the sixth in the bass; then he softly hits an E-flat, a flattened fifth for A major.
VII: Cat Food
This song is another example of King Crimson doing a perverse variation on the 12-bar blues structure, with Tippett mixing in dissonant tone clusters with his more usual jazzy piano playing, and with the usual 4/4 time getting bars of 6/8 thrown in between from time to time. The song is in E minor.
The song is satirizing capitalism and consumerism, and all of the maddening effects these have on people, hence the piano discords. A woman shopping in a supermarket wants to talk to the manager, presumably to make a complaint. “Grooning to the muzak” sounds like an ironic comment on Fripp’s instrumental with drummer Michael Giles and his bassist brother, Peter (who plays all the bass parts on this album instead of Lake), “Groon,” Side B to the “Cat Food” single. Groon is a pun on groan, a complaining sound.
The blatantly atonal “Groon,” truly an acquired taste for most listeners, is a piece of avant-garde jazz that sounds like a Cecil Taylor improvisation, but with Fripp’s guitar replacing Taylor’s piano. The supermarket shopper, however, is annoyed with the muzak, or ‘elevator music,’ which is annoying at the other extreme: it’s music so bland, so ‘nice,’ and so conventional that it desperately needs a little dissonance to make it half-way interesting to listen to. The contrast between “Groon” and muzak is also the contrast between music as experimental art and music as sellable commodity.
She lays out her goods, as if to complain about them to the manager. They’re all “conveniently frozen,” so she can “come back for more” as soon as she’s finished with them. This is convenient for capitalists, who can make more money when she comes back. Ironically, this ‘convenience’ is what she has to complain about.
Next, the woman shopper is cooking at home, whipping up “a chemical brew/Croaking to a neighbour as she polishes a sabre.” The “chemical brew” suggests some kind of processed food from the supermarket, superficially tasty, but ultimately bad for you. Just as she ‘grooned’ to the muzak, now she ‘croaks’ in complaint to a neighbour, suggesting the social alienation that comes from the same source as the fetishized commodities that she’s bought–capitalism. The ‘sabre’ she polishes is presumably her cooking knife, but calling it a sabre evokes the idea that it’s used for killing rather than feeding.
She “knows how to flavour a stew,” but her meal is “poisoned especially for you,” because as I said above, this processed food, in its “tin,” is bad for you. “Hurri Curri” sounds like a brand name of cat food, or its particular flavour. It’s also a pun on hara kari, a form of ritual suicide, given how willingly eating such innutritious, processed food, this ‘hurried curry,’ this instant food, is bad for you.
Because the capitalist system is focused more on profit than on providing a nutritious product, we get the blues from it, hence the song’s 12-bar structure. The alienation from capitalism causes mental health problems, too, hence the piano dissonances, Lake’s mad cackling at the end of this second verse, and “your mother’s quite insane,” in the repeated bridge verse.
“Cat food…again?” sounds like a complaint about eating the same old crap over and over again. Cat food, with its unpleasant smell and even more unpleasant contents, is a metaphor for all the unhealthy junk food we all eat at least once in a while, enriching its producers.
“A fable on the label” of so many of these food products, stuffed in cans, suggests the lie that they’re full of vitamins, minerals, and other nutritious ingredients, when actually the processing and artificial colours, additives, and preservatives ruin the said nutrients, in all likelihood. It’s “drowning in miracle sauce,” meaning that the sauce, however superficially tasty it may be, is killing the nutrients by drowning them. With all of this understanding, the last two lines of the song should be self-explanatory.
The song ends with improvising over the 12-bar blues structure, with its alternating of a few bars of 4/4 with one in 6/8. Michael Giles does a few great drum licks here, as Tippett does with his colourful, jazzy piano.
VIII: The Devil’s Triangle
As I said above, this piece evolved out of “Mars,” the instrumental improvisation that the original King Crimson lineup played in their live shows, based in turn on the first movement of Holst’s The Planets. For this reason, I see the resulting studio version as still thematically linked to the horrors of war, and it’s therefore fitting to have it immediately precede “Peace–An End,” for dialectical purposes as I’ll explain later.
The piece includes three sections, titled “Merday Morn,” “Hand of Sceiron,” and “Garden of Worm.” The first part gives partial writing credit to McDonald, but not the last part, which includes the clip from “The Court of the Crimson King,” which he wrote with Sinfield.
“Merday Morn” opens with a long, slow fade-in: the listener may get impatient waiting to hear any music. It’s as if the music were the sun slowly rising over the watery horizon of the ocean, the beginning of the ‘day of the sea,’ hence the name of this section. We sense that Poseidon is waking up, hence the album’s title, taken literally.
Recall that ‘the Devil’s Triangle’ is another name for the Bermuda Triangle, the legend surrounding the place–the three corners of which are Bermuda, Miami, and Puerto Rico–being that ships and airplanes entering it mysteriously disappear. One senses the fiery wrath of the sea-god here, and why the music is so spooky.
In the entire piece, we have all four elements represented: in “Merday Morn,” the sea obviously represents water, and the rising sun represents fire (as well as Poseidon’s fiery wrath); in “Hand of Sceiron,” air is represented at the end of the section by the sound of strong winds, as if ships are entering a storm; and “Garden of Worm” suggests the element of earth, symbolic of a grave for the dead in sunken ships at the bottom of the ocean, the ground of the seabed.
When we finally start hearing the music, we hear Michael Giles playing a martial beat in 5/4, accompanied by his brother, Peter, on the bass. Fripp is providing melody and harmony on the Mellotron, at first with string section tape, then, when the music starts to get tense, he uses brass section tape. To add to the tension, we’ll hear him play a lot of tritone intervals, which are fitting as the diabolus in musica.
“Hand of Sceiron” begins with a foghorn sound, suggesting that ships are approaching a dangerous area at sea. Along with the tritones heard on the Mellotron, we hear lots more dissonance on, for example, Tippett’s piano. This section ends, as noted above, with those winds. Sceiron refers to violent winds in a myth from an area described in Book IX, Chapter One (section 4) of Strabo‘s Geographica. A ticking metronome sounds like a clock that is ticking towards the end of one’s life.
Of course, the tension is raised to a climax in the “Garden of Worm” section, with its faster tempo and heightened dissonance. Independent layers of sound are put together: the 5/4 martial beat heard on the drums, with the bass in 4/4 playing descending fifths, and dissonance in the Mellotron and piano tone clusters. It all descends into chaos, including, by way of xenochrony, a brief passage for string section, and the clip from “The Court of the Crimson King.” It all ends with flurries of flute notes and a soft, arpeggiated resolution in E major on Fripp’s acoustic guitar.
So, what does all of this music mean? What does a ship entering the Bermuda Triangle and going missing there, all the passengers presumed dead, signify? The piece’s link with “Mars,” with the martial beat (though different from Holst’s original rhythm, because Holst’s estate did not give Fripp permission to use it), suggests the symbolism of war, too. But what do a ship lost in a sea storm, and soldiers killed or missing in action in a war, symbolize in “The Devil’s Triangle,” and In the Wake of Poseidon as a whole?
Recall the archetypes from the title track and the album cover, and how these reside in the collective unconscious. In the wake of Poseidon means ‘as a(n unpleasant) consequence of the sea-god.’ The realm of Poseidon, the ocean, is symbolic of the unconscious, both personal and collective. So as a consequence of confronting Poseidon and his tempestuous ways, we awaken the unconscious and discover those unpleasant parts of ourselves that we want to reject, repress, or project onto other people. To confront them is to confront what Jung called the Shadow. This is a scary, but necessary and enlightening experience.
“The Devil’s Triangle” begins in silence, and with a slow fade-in, because such a beginning represents not only the unawareness of unconscious conflicts, but also the unwillingness to learn of them, the resistance against them. As the music gets more and more dissonant, one is becoming more and more aware of the unpleasant, rejected parts of the Shadow.
The social problems dealt with in the other songs–urban alienation and decadence in “Pictures of a City,” hero-worship of wealth and celebrity in “Cadence and Cascade,” and capitalist consumerism in “Cat Food”–have their psychological roots in these unconscious, repressed conflicts. The way to end the conflicts and attain peace of mind is not to avoid them, by sailing around the Bermuda Triangle of the psyche, but to go through it and risk the dangers therein.
And dangerous it is. Jung warned of these risks when attempting to do what he called individuation through Shadow work, dream interpretation, and Active Imagination. One is advised, when doing this inner work, to have someone monitoring you, ideally a fully-trained therapist specializing in Jungian psychology. Otherwise, one risks navigating the treacherous waters of repressed traumas, leading to psychological fragmentation, a psychotic break with reality (what Lacan called The Real), which is what the “Garden of Worm” section represents.
The significant thing, though, that happens if you can make it through the maelstrom symbolized by the ending of “The Devil’s Triangle” (as Jung apparently did by bravely facing the demons of his own unconscious), and can integrate the darker aspects of your mind with the lighter ones, you can come out the other side and find peace and bliss, as symbolized by the pretty flurry of flute notes and Fripp’s acoustic guitar ending.
(Such psychological integration includes a man confronting his anima, as represented by the six female faces on the album cover and described in the title track, and a woman confronting her animus, the six male archetypes on the cover and in the title track. In this connection, the sea can be masculine, Poseidon, or feminine, Thalassa. La mer est la mère.)
I’ve written many times about my personal interpretation of the symbolism of the ouroboros, as representing the dialectical relationship between opposites as the meeting ends (the serpent’s head and tail) of a circular continuum (the serpent’s coiled body) including all intermediate points between the extremes. We can hear this oneness in contradiction in “The Devil’s Triangle” in how the music starts in peaceful silence, then the music comes in and gets increasingly dissonant, a move from the serpent’s biting head, down its coiled body towards its bitten tail. At the tail of extreme chaos and pain, we cross over to the head and back to peace and bliss, leading thus to…
IX: Peace–An End
One interesting thing about the “Peace” trilogy is how this last one is musically in ternary form (ABA), while “Peace–A Theme” is in binary form (AABB), and “Peace–A Beginning” is just the A theme heard twice. It’s as though peace begins as just a germinating idea, then it develops, and now it is complete, after having gone through the necessary hell of “The Devil’s Triangle.”
Furthermore, the first part is essentially a cappella, the second just an acoustic guitar solo, and this last part has both Lake and Fripp. It is musically thus the Hegelian dialectic triad of thesis (“Beginning”), negation (“Theme”), and sublation (“End”), this last part not only being complete, but also a resolution of the contradiction of the previous two parts. In fact, the first two parts ended without perfect resolutions: the A, F-sharp, C, and A-sharp on Fripp’s guitar ending “Beginning”; the A 6-9 chord with the sixth in the bass and the E-flat ending “Theme.”
Only now do we have a truly peaceful resolution in E major, with Lake’s last sung note, on “war,” being a D-flat, a major sixth in relation to the tonic, and so it’s reasonably consonant. It suggests, in combination with “war,” a somewhat tenuous peace–since when is perfect peace ever realized, anyway?–but it’s peace all the same, and therefore a fitting end to the album.
Two of the four elements are mentioned in the first line of the first verse–water and air (“sea” and “wind”). Water will again be mentioned in the first line of the last verse, too–“stream.” The reference to “dawn on a day without end” suggests earth and fire, in that we imagine the sun peeking over the horizon, that is, over the land, hills, and mountains in the morning. The fire of the sun will shine on an eternal day, too.
Because the four elements are so fundamentally what make up everything as we imagine it here, they bring us closer to the blissful oneness of Brahman, and therefore to peace, nirvana. Those twelve archetypal faces are each associated with two of the elements; and since attaining psychological peace, as I described it above–with my ouroboros symbolism–involves confronting the twelve archetypes in the Shadow of the ocean of the unconscious, then peace is in this way also associated with the elements.
A bird sings as you smile because it is pleased with your happiness–it is your friend. Peace causes a foe to love you as a friend; we must take those troublesome archetypes of the unconscious and make them our friends–this is how we change war into peace. We bring love to a child, like the sweet, innocent girl on the cover with the white key on her necklace. She has the key to heaven, remember, because one has to be as a child to enter heaven, the realm of peace.
You search for your friends, but can’t find them, because you foolishly don’t realize how close they are to you, like the nirvana and Buddhahood that the lost vagabond son of the parable doesn’t realize he already has, personified by his father. You search for yourself everywhere outside, but you don’t realize that you have to do the inner work, as described in my interpretation of “The Devil’s Triangle,” to find yourself within, in the twelve archetypes, the four elements, and the Atman that is already one with the oceanic feeling of Brahman.
The heart is what empathy flows from, so that’s why peace is a stream from there. Breadth, that is, the width of tolerance and open-mindedness, is the dawn, or beginning, of peace.
The fire of the sun will burn forever for peace, that is, without end; yet peace is also the end, ironically, like death, of the war. The war people would have had in mind back in 1970 was, of course, the Vietnam War, wishing it would end.
There are other wars, though, besides literal ones, that need to end. There’s the emotional war of psychological conflict, as dramatized in “The Devil’s Triangle” and the title track. The Jungian inner work described above to integrate the light and dark parts of the psyche, the conscious and unconscious, to bring about inner peace, can be compared to the Buddhist’s quest for nirvana.
Nirvana literally refers to the blowing out of a flame representing desire, and therefore suffering also. Nirvana is the resulting peace from having extinguished the fire of the delusion of a permanent ego. Yet Sinfield’s lyric, of peace as the dawn of a day without end, implies a permanently burning fire, while peace is also the end…and nirvana is the end of suffering.
How can we reconcile this contradiction, of a permanent fire and its extinguishment as both meaning peace? We can do so as the Mahayana tradition of Buddhism does, by equating nirvana with samsara, the cycle of reincarnation. We did so before with the dialectical interpretation of attaining peace by first going through the Devil’s Triangle, by passing first through hell to get to heaven. Similarly, the bodhisattva first swears off nirvana until he’s helped all living creatures to get there, hence they all travel there on the Great Vehicle, that boat that must weather Poseidon’s storm at sea.
Note how Lake’s singing on “Peace–An End” brings back the reverb at the end, just as “Peace–A Beginning” started with reverb. This beginning and ending reverb thus gives us a sense that the album has come full circle, like the cyclical eternity that the ouroboros originally symbolized. In this sense, we can see how peace never ends, even in a world full of suffering. Nirvana is samsara because we can only have peace and happiness by accepting the inevitability of pain.
X: Conclusion
Based on the interpretation I’ve given above, I must say that In the Wake of Poseidon, though not exactly a masterpiece, deserves better than being dismissed as a mere copy, or sequel, of In the Court of the Crimson King. To be sure, much of the second album does rework the first, but there are other things going on that shouldn’t be ignored.
Side Two of Poseidon is essentially new (the xenochrony notwithstanding). The first album presented the problems of the world; the second album expands on the discussion of those problems, and it also proposes a solution. Most importantly of all, In the Wake of Poseidon presents a kind of Jungian odyssey through hell to get to heaven, giving it a kind of universality of human experience that makes it an album that doesn’t just live in the shadow of its predecessor, but exists in its own right.
Infinite Ocean 
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