Jason Weller
ENG 102-1401-1411

The Convergence of the Twain

The Convergence of the Twain was written by Thomas Hardy and it describes the tragedy of the sinking of Titanic. The story is told through the eyes of the poet who sees the sinking as something fate driven, the Titanic was boasted as being unsinkable by its creator but is ultimately sunk by the one object that it had to avoid, an iceberg.

The subject of the poem is the Titanic the grandest ship ever built a modern marvel thought to be indestructible. Until the fateful night when it struck the equally grand iceberg in the North Atlantic Ocean. The poet’s use of irony to describe the vanity of the humans who claimed the ship to be indestructible only to have a force of nature destroy it. The lines that open the poem “In a solitude of the sea, Deep from human vanity, And the Pride of Life that planned her, stilly couches she.” shows the poets tone that will be continued throughout the entire poem. He states the ship lies deep below the ocean’s surface far from the people who boasted about her grandeur.
He continues with this approach in each stanza as he slowly moves from comparing how the ship is now at the bottom of the dark ocean where blind sea worms crawl across not seeing anything let alone the beauty that the ship once was with its bright jewels and shiny mirrors. The grand furnaces of the ship were described as being Salamandrine Pyres, and now covered by the seas tidal lyres, waves rhythmically rolling over and through the once grand chambers. After more ironic comparisons Hardy moves to describing how at the same time man was busy building its great ship and proclaiming it to be the biggest and strongest ever, nature was slowly creating its own strong force. “And as the smart ship grew, in stature, grace, and hue, in shadowy silent distance grew the Iceberg too.” Shows how that as the ship was being built as too was the iceberg growing. The iceberg was the one force in the ocean which posed a threat to the Titanic, hence the irony shown by the writer to focus on the intertwined fate of the iceberg and the ship almost as if the ship was built for the purpose of hitting the iceberg and vice versa. This fact is brought home thru each stanza as the poem shows the state of the parts of the ship now as well as when it was originally built. Hardy choses to focus on the telling of the story not from a human loss of life perspective or from the side how careless, arrogance and unpreparedness lead to the sinking and ultimate death of more than half of the passengers.
As Hardy shows through the weaving of his story his belief is that the ship and the iceberg were brought together by a force much greater than man, something other worldly almost biblical in nature. A divine higher power to no doubt remind man that no matter how great he believes his work to be the forces of nature are always more powerful and the higher power will keep things in balance. His story makes a comparison to the vanity of man making them blind to the fact that nothing is indestructible. In stanza 11 Hardy says “Till the Spinner of the Years, Said "Now!" And each one hears, and consummation comes, and jars two hemispheres.” This is the ultimate statement of his belief, as he wrote it that the ship and the iceberg were indeed brought together by a higher power (Spinner of Years) and that the fate of the ship, most of its passengers and the reputation builders was belied by the fact that they were shown that the higher power and great will is the supreme force in our world.