I was recently asked by a student the meaning of H.P. Lovecraft’s famous couplet, which he attributes to Alhazred…

“That is not dead which can eternal lie.
And with strange aeons even death may die.”

I answered that Lovecraft was presenting these lines as having been written in The Necronomicon by a mad 6th century Arab poet called Abdul Alhazred. Lovecraft states that The Necronomicon was originally written in Arabic, then translated into Greek, then Low Latin — and finally this fragment is rendered into English by the narrator of the short story “The Nameless City” (1921) in which the lines appear. That’s what Lovecraft would have the reader believe, and the fact that it is meant to be ‘a translation of a translation of a translation of a translation’ might explain why Lovecraft has his narrator call the couplet “unexplainable”. Yet, in typical Lovecraftian fashion, it is then partly explained: the narrator says the lines are related to a dream of Alhazred’s of “the nameless city” depicted in the story. How he knows this fact is not explained.

This aspect of the couplet’s apparent meaning was later picked up in Lovecraft’s “The Call of Cthulhu”. In this masterpiece the same couplet gets a repeat outing, with the same wording. In that later and more famous story the reader is clearly meant to understand couplet as being a prophesy — of the awakening of Cthulhu from the sunken city of R’lyeh. So once again it is meant to refer, obliquely, to a mysterious forgotten city. Those few fans who remembered the earlier “The Nameless City” story (published in the obscure The Wolverine) while reading “Cthulhu” were thus presumably meant to think that the narrator of that earlier tale was somewhat astray in his understanding of the couplet. For more precise understanding of how the couplet might relate to the idea of immortal beings, sunken cities lying in the deeps of the sea, and the nature of the sleeping Cthulhu, read the famous story itself.