IV
Jewels in joy designed To ravish the sensuous mind Lie lightless, all their sparkles bleared and black and blind.
v
Dim moon-eyed fishes near Gaze at the gilded gear And query: "What does this vaingloriousness down here?"
Welclass="underline" while was fashioning This creature of cleaving wing, The Immanent Will that stirs and urges everything
Prepared a sinister mate For her—so gaily great— A Shape of Ice, for the time far and dissociate.
VIII
And as the smart ship grew In stature, grace, and hue In shadowy silent distance grew the Iceberg too.
Alien they seemed to be: No mortal eye could see The intimate welding of their later history,
Or sign that they were bent By paths coincident On being anon twin halves of one august event,
XI
Till the Spinner of the Years Said "Now!" And each one hears, And consummation comes, and jars two hemispheres.
This is your bona fide occasional poem in the form of a public address. In fact, it is an oration; it gives you the feeling that it should be spoken from a pulpit. The opening line—"In a solitude of the sea"—is extraordinarily spacious, both vocally and visually, suggesting the width of the sea's horizon and that degree of elemental autonomy which is capable of perceiving its own solitude.
But if the opening line scans the vast surface, the second line—"Deep from human vanity"—takes you farther away from the human sphere, straight into the heart of this utterly isolated element. In fact, the second line is an invitation for the underwater journey which is what the first half of the poem—a lengthy exposition again!—amounts to. Toward the end of the third line, the reader is well along on a veritable scuba-diving expedition.
Trimeters are a tricky proposition. They may be rewarding euphonically, but they naturally constrain the content. At the outset ofthe poem they help our poet to establish his tonality; but he is anxious to get on with the business of the poem. For this, he gets the third, quite capacious hex- ametric line, in which he proceeds indeed in a very businesslike, bloody-minded fashion:
And the Pride of Life that planned her, stilly couches .she.
The first half of this line is remarkable for its pileup of stresses, no less than for what it ushers in: the rhetorical, abstract construct which is, on top of that, also capitalized.
Now, the Pride of Life is of course linked syntactically to human vanity, but this helps matters little because (a) human vanity is not capitalized, and (b) it is still more coherent and familiar a concept than the Pride of Life. Furthermore, the two n's in "that planned her" give you a sense of a truly jammed, bottleneck-type diction, befitting an editorial more than a poem.
No poet in his right mind would try to cram all this into half a line: it is barely utterable. On the other hand, as we've noted, there were no mikes. Actually, "And the Pride of Life that planned her," though menaced by its mechanical scansion, can be delivered out loud, to the effect of somewhat unwarranted emphasis; the effort, however, will be obvious. The question is, why does Thomas Hardy do this? And the answer is, because he is confident that the image of the ship resting at the bottom of the sea and the triple rhyme will bail this stanza out.
"Stilly couches she" is indeed a wonderful counterbalance to the unwieldy pileup of stresses ushering it in. The two Is—a "liquid" consonant—in "stilly" almost convey the gently rocking body of the ship. As for the rhyme, it clinches the femininity of the ship, already emphasized by the verb "couches." For the purposes of the poem, this suggestion is indeed timely.
What does our poet's deportment in this stanza and, above all, in its third line tell us about him? That he is a very calculating fellow (at least he counts his stresses). Also, that his pen is driven less by a sense ofharmony than by his central idea, and that his triple rhyme is a euphonic necessity second and a structural device first. As rhymes go, what we've got in this stanza is no great shakes. The best that can be said about it is that it is highly functional and reverberates the wonderful fifteenth-century poem sometimes attributed to Dunbar:
In what estate so ever I be Timor mortis conturbat me . . . "All Christian people, behold and see: This world is but a vanity And replete with necessity. Timor mortis conturbat me. "
It's quite possible that these lines indeed set "The Convergence of the Twain" in motion, because it is a poem above all about vanity and necessity, as well, of course, as about fear of death. However, what perturbs the seventy-two-year- old Thomas Hardy in his poem is precisely necessity.
Steel chambers, late the pyres Of her salamandrine fires, Cold currents thrid, and turn to rhythmic tidal lyres.
We are indeed on an underwater journey here, and although the rhymes are not getting any better (we encounter our old friend "lyres"), this stanza is striking because of its visual content. We are clearly in the engine room, and the entire machinery is seen quiveringly refracted by water. The word that really stars in this stanza is "salamandrine." Apart from its mythological and metallurgical connotations, this four- syllable-long, lizardlike epithet marvelously evokes the quivering motion of the element directly opposite to water: fire. Extinguished, yet sustained, as it were, by refractions.
"Cold" in "Cold currents thrid, and turn to rhythmic tidal lyres" underscores this transformation; but on the whole, the line is extremely interesting because it arguably contains a hidden metaphor of the very process of composing this poem. On the surface—or, rather, underneath it—we have the movement of the waves approaching the shore (or a bay, or a cove), which looks like the hom of a lyre. Breakers, then, are its played strings. The verb "thrid," being the archaic (or dialect) form of "thread," while conveying the weaving of the sound and meaning from line to line, eu- phonically also evokes the triangularity of the stanzaic design, which is a triplet. In other words, with the progression from "fire" to "cold" we get here to an artifice that suggests artistic self-consciousness in general and, given the treatment a great tragedy receives in this poem, Hardy's in particular. For, to put it bluntly, "The Convergence of the Twain" is devoid of the "hot" feelings that might seem appropriate, given the volume ofhuman loss. This is an entirely unsentimental job, and in the second stanza our poet reveals somewhat (most likely unwittingly) the way it's done.
Over the mirrors meant To glass the opulent The sea-worm crawls—grotesque, slimed, dumb, indifferent.
This is where, I believe, the poem's reputation for social criticism comes from. It is there, of course, but that's the least of it. The Titanic was indeed a floating palace. The ballroom, casino, and cabins themselves were built to redefine luxury on the grandest scale, their decor was lavish. To convey this, the poet uses the verb "to glass," which both doubles the opulence and betrays its one-dimensionality: it is glass-deep. However, in the scene Mr. Hardy paints here, he is concerned less, I think, with debunking the rich than with the discrepancy between the intent and the outcome. The sea-worm crawling over the mirror stands in not for the essence of capitalism but for "the opulent" 's opposite.
The succession of negative epithets qualifying that sea- worm tells us quite a lot about Mr. Hardy himself. For in order to know the value of a negative epithet, one should always try applying it to oneself first. Being a poet, not to mention a novelist, Thomas Hardy would have done that more than once. Therefore, the succession of negative epithets here could and should be perceived as reflecting his hierarchy of human wrongs, the gravest being the last on the list. And the last on this list, sitting above all in the rhyming position, is "indifferent." This renders "grotesque, slimed, dumb" as lesser evils. At least from the point of view of this poet, they are; and one can't help thinking that the gravity "indifferent" is burdened with in this context is perhaps self-referential.