Jewels in joy designed
To ravish the sensuous mind Lie lightless, all their sparkles bleared and black and blind.
Perhaps this is as good a time as any to point to the cinematic, frame-by-frame procedure our poet resorts to here, and the fact that he is doing this in 1912, long before film became a daily—well, nightly—reality. I believe I've said someplace that it was poetry that invented the technique of montage, not Eisenstein. A vertical arrangement of identical stanzas on the page is a film. A couple of years ago a salvaging company trying to raise the Titanic showed its footage of the ship on TV; it was remarkably close to the matter at hand. Their emphasis was obviously on the contents of the ship's vault, which among other things might have contained a manuscript of Joseph Conrad's most recent novel, which was sent by the author to his American publisher with the ship, since it was to be the speediest mail carrier, among other virtues. The camera circled in the vault area incessantly, attracted by the smell of its riches, but to no avail. Thomas Hardy does a far better job.
"Jewels in joy designed" practically glitters with its j's and s's. So again does, with its swishing and hissing s's, the next line. Yet the most fascinating use of alliteration is on display in the third line, where the ravished, sensuous mind goes flat, as all the line's /'s crackle and burst in "sparkles," turning the jewels in "b/eared and b/ack and b/ind" into so many released bubbles rising to the line's end. The alliteration is literally undoing itself in front of our eyes.
It is more rewarding to admire the poet's ingenuity here than to read into this line a sermon on the ephemeral and destructive nature of riches. Even if the latter were his concern, the emphasis would be on the paradox itself rather than the social commentary. Had Thomas Hardy been fifty years younger at the time of the composition of "The Convergence of the Twain," he perhaps might have sharpened the social edge of the poem a bit more, though even this is doubtful. As it was, he was seventy-two years old, fairly well off himself; and among the 1,500 souls lost when the Titanic went down, two were his personal acquaintances. However, on his underwater journey, he is not looking for them either.
Dim moon-eyed fishes near
Gaze at the gilded gear And query: "What does this vaingloriousness down here?"
"Gaze at the gilded gear" has obviously crept into the second line of this stanza by pure alliterative inertia (the author presumably had other word combinations to consider working up the last stanza, and this is just one of the spin-offs), which serves to recapitulate the ship's ostentatiousness. Fish are seen here as if through a porthole, hence the magnifying- glass effect dilating the fish eyes and making them moonlike. Of much greater consequence, however, is this stanza's third line, which concludes the exposition and serves as the springboard for the poem's main business.
"And query: 'What does this vaingloriousness down here?' " is not only a rhetorical turn setting up the rest of the poem to provide the answer to the question posed by the line. It is first of all the recapturing of the oratorical posture, somewhat diluted by the lengthy exposition. To achieve that, the poet heightens his diction here, by combining the legalese of "'query" with the clearly ecclesiastical "vaingloriousness." The latter's five-syllable-long hulk mar- velously evokes the cumbersomeness of the ship at the sea's bottom. Apart from this, though, both the legalese and the ecclesiastical clearly point to a stylistic shift and a change of the whole discourse's plane of regard.
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.
Now, "Well" here both disarms and signals a regrouping. It's a colloquial conceit, designed both to put the audience a bit off guard—should "vaingloriousness" have put it on alert—and to pump some extra air into the speaker's lungs as he embarks on a lengthy, extremely loaded period. Resembling somewhat the speech mannerisms of our fortieth President, "Well" here indicates that the movie part of the poem is over and now the discourse begins in earnest. It appears that the subject, after all, is not submarine fauna but Mr. Hardy's—as well as poetry's very own, ever since the days of Lucretius—concept of causality.
"Welclass="underline" while was fashioning/This creature of cleaving wing" informs the public—syntactically, above all—that we are beginning from afar. More important, the subordinate clause preceding the Immanent Will statement exploits to the hilt the ship's gender designation in our language. We've got three words here with increasingly feminine connotations, whose proximity to each other adds up to an impression of deliberate emphasis. "Fashioning" could have been a fairly neutral reference to shipbuilding were it not qualified by "this creature," with its overtones of particular fondness, and were "this creature" itself not side-lit by "cleaving." There is more of"cleavage" in "cleaving" than of "cleaver," which, while denoting the movement of the ship's prow through the water, also echoes a type of sail with its whiteness, resembling a blade. In any case, the conjunction of "cleaving wing"—and "wing" itselfespecially, sitting here in the rhyming position—pitches the line sufficiently high for Mr. Hardy to usher in a notion central to his entire mental operation, that of"The Immanent Will that stirs and urges everything."
Hexameter gives this notion's skeptical grandeur full play. The caesura separates the formula from the qualifier in the most natural way, letting us fully appreciate the almost thundering reverberations of consonants in "Immanent Will," as well as the resolute assertiveness "that stirs and urges everything." The latter is all the more impressive thanks to the reserve in the line's dactyls—which borders, in fact, on hesitation—detectable in "everything." Third in the stanza, this line is burdened with the inertia of resolution, and gives you a feeling the entire poem has been written for the sake of this statement.
Why? Because if one could speak of Mr. Hardy's philosophical outlook (if one can speak about a poet's philosophy at all, since, given the omniscient nature of language alone, such discourse is doomed to be reductive by definition), one would have to admit that the notion of Immanent Will was paramount to it. Now, it all harks back to Schopenhauer, with whom the sooner you get acquainted the better—not so much for Mr. Hardy's sake as for your own. Schopenhauer will save you quite a trip; more exactly, his notion of the Will, which he introduced in his The World as Will and Idea, will. Every philosophical system, you see, can easily be charged with being essentially a solipsistic, if not downright anthropomorphic, endeavor. By and large they all are, precisely because they are systems and thus imply a varying—usually quite high—degree of rationality of overall design. Schopenhauer escapes this charge with his Will, which is his term for tlie phenomenal world's inner essence; better yet, for a ubiquitous nonrational force and its blind, striving power operating in the world. Its operations are devoid of ultimate purpose or design and are not many a philosopher's incarnations of rational or moral order. In the end, of course, this notion can also be charged with being a human self-projection. Yet it can defend itself better than others with its horrific, meaningless omniscience, permeating all forms of struggle for existence but voiced (from Schopenhauer's point of view, presumably only echoed) by poetry alone. Small wonder that Thomas Hardy, with his appetite for the infinite and the inanimate, zeroed in on this notion; small wonder that he capitalizes it in this line, for whose sake one may think the entire poem was written.