Maelstrom

Poe's short story 'A Descent into the Maelstrom' is a story about the swirl. That is the swirl as a natural phenomenon and a psychical one.
Here is a description of the sea observed from high up on a crag:

"Here the vast bed of the waters, seamed and scarred into a thousand conflicting channels, burst suddenly into phrensied convulsions—heaving, boiling, hissing—gyrating in gigantic and innumerable vortices. ... In a few minutes more, . . . the general surface grew somewhat more smooth, and the whirlpools, one by one, disappeared, while prodigious streaks of foam . . . spreading out to a great distance, and entering into combination, took unto themselves the gyratory motion "Of the subsided vortices, and seemed to form the germ of another more vast. Suddenly —very suddenly—this assumed a distinct and definite existence, in a circle of more than a mile in diameter. . . . "

And later this becomes terrifying:

"The edge of the whirl was represented by a broad belt of gleaming spray; but no particle of this slipped into the mouth of the terrific funnel, whose interior, as far as the eye could fathom it, was a smooth, shining, and jet-black wall of water, inclined to the horizon at an angle of some forty-five degrees, speeding dizzily round and round with a swaying and sweltering motion, and sending forth to the winds an appalling voice, half shriek, half roar, such as not even the mighty cataract of Niagara ever lifts up in its agony to Heaven."

So, this particular phenomenon is about an extraordinarily powerful and intense force. The force is one of sucking in to its space almost everything caught in the maelstrom. Almost everything?

Almost everything and everybody except for the sailor whose story is narrated.