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 seemed 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). Hardy also numbers all of the eleven stanzas of his poem. 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. This method gives us a chance to understand the poem more efficiently by studying one stanza at a time.
             At first reading the poem, it seemed to reveal five stanzas describing the "gilded gear"(line 14) at the bottom of the sea and six stanzas that refer to the ship and to the ice-berg converging at a point so "far
             ...