A Ship Sunk by the Overwhelming Weight of Human Vanity Anonymous 12th Grade

In his poem “The Convergence of the Twain,” Thomas Hardy describes the unfortunate, yet truly inevitable, sinking of the supposedly invincible Titanic. Concurrently, the poem depicts humanity’s vain struggle against the steadfast forces of nature. The poem’s structural organization as well as diction and figurative language convey the speaker’s disapproving attitude towards man’s hubristic creation of the Titanic.

The poem’s arrangement into rhyming tercets as well as further division into three distinct sections based on an inverted chronology reflect nature’s absolute influence over the inevitability of the Titanic’s crash. Each tercet is composed of two trimeters such as “In the solitude of the sea / deep from human vanity” (1-2) and one hexameter such as “and the Pride of Life that planned her, stilly couches she” (3). The addition of the three syllables from the first line and the three syllables from the subsequent line add up to the six syllables found in the third line, mimicking the convergence of the ship and the iceberg. Furthermore, consistent end rhymes such as “pyres” (4), “fires” (5), and “lyres” (6) contribute to the smooth, flowing rhythm of the stanzas, creating a wave-like pattern that reflects the poem’s...