The critic Christopher Ricks writes that it is among the best poems in the volume, all of which originate in Tennyson’s "despondency".
[1] In “The Kraken," writes Robert Preyer, a "very early work, one already sees a magnificent matching of the various technical components to secure an effect that is intense, strange, remote, and curiously suggestive and impersonal.
One adds that the ABABCDDCEFEAAFE rhyme scheme of three quatrains and a concluding couplet suggests that it is on the Petrarchan (Italian) model rather than the Shakespearean form.
"[5] Robert Preyer writes that the poem contains "apocalyptic shapes unseen by the ordinary person" and its "oracular voice" tells of "mindless forces" that are capable of "exploding to the surface in a burst of irrational frenzy that marks the end of its peculiar life-in-death, the end of ordinary living, and also the onset of eternity."
The poem does not offer rationalization for its vivid images: "the timeless, mythic voice giving utterance to the oracle is exactly right.