I failed to love round, but fallen flat,
My head slumps down, over an ancient map,
My eyes roll back, over the mappa mundi verge,
Where waterfalls purl, and the sea serpent-sleep lies curled.
Mappa mundi are surviving Medieval maps of the world that often depicted sea monsters and dragons. In spite of a common belief, most educated Medieval classes did not think the earth was flat (known as the Flat Earth myth) nor did most scholars from the classic Greek period on. Similarly, no old world map contains the exact phrase “Here Be Dragons” to connote uncharted territories, though dragons and sea monsters often allegorically depicted the same.