The Convergence of the Twain
Thomas Hardy wrote this poem with a very evident chronological disruption midway through the poem. Unlike most poets who keep their poems in sequential order to maintain suspense throughout the poem, Hardy seemed to believe that the subject of the Titanic was so well known that there was not any reason to keep the readers in sus-pense of what impending doom awaited the Titanic. Instead, he commenced his poem with a description of the Titanic at present: "grotesque, slimed, dumb, indifferent"(line 9). Then he proceeds to the "fashioning"(line 16) of the famous ship and continues to that famous April evening when the "consummation"(line 33) of the two "titanic" masses oc-curred--the grand ship made from human hands and the silent iceberg made by the "Im-manent Will"(line 18). Hardy does not confine himself inside the walls of set syllables per verse; every stanza has a different number of syllables in each verse. In the first part of his poem, the rhythm is very fascinating. With proper uses of caesuras, stresses and slacks, Hardy seems to capture the solitude of the sea that he is de-scribing with his steady, gentle sway of words, a "rhythmic tidal lyre"(line 6). While reading this poem, the words se
This method gives us a chance to understand the poem more efficiently by studying one stanza at a time. ------------------------------------------------------------------------**Bibliography**. Hardy takes more of an adversative approach toward the story of the Titanic than most people think of or 'choose' to think of when they hear of the tragedy. The numbering indicates the division of each one of the stanzas as if to im-ply that we have to look at this poem as eleven different poems in one. God challenged the human's creation of the greatest mass on the water with His own. There-fore, He played with the humans "gigantic toy" with his own water toy--a great iceberg. Everything had to be made to be faster, larger, stronger and more efficient, thus resulting in the building of the Titanic. Instead of a tragic poem of the people involved in this tragic event, Hardy distances himself from the picture, far enough just to see the two grand and noble objects, a Godlike view solely focused on the two massive entities. Consequently, I believe that Hardy does not want us to share in the travesty that they have experienced. People relate emotionally to the story of the Titanic by watching the movie that was released a few years ago because it is from the point of view of the people on the ship. However, an enjambment oc-curs between stanza VI and stanza VII, as if these two stanzas were meant to be one: "The Immanent Will that stirs and urges everything / Prepared a sinister mate"(lines 18/19). Through his poem, Hardy explains to us that it is a vengeful God that planned the collision. Humans thought themselves to be so evolved that they were above Him. emed to move persistently slowly up and down like the tide: (I) "In a solitude of the sea/ Deep from human vanity, / And the Pride of life that planned her, stilly couches she"(lines 1-3). In the section of the poem that contrasts the development of the ship to of the iceberg, Hardy points out some human vanity.
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Acceptance Essays
