“Jewels in joy designed/ To ravish the sensuous mind/ Lie lightless, all their sparkles bleared and black and blind”
In this quote, Hardy employs dense alliteration to build up rich visual imagery while emphasizing the irony at the center of the poem. The stanza shifts from soft /j/ sounds, in “jewels in joy,” slippery /s/ sounds, in “sensuous” and “sparkles,” and rounded /l/ sounds “lie lightless,” to sharp /b/ sounds, “bleared and black and blind.” By repeating each of these sounds, the poem charts out a clear movement from the delicacy and softness of luxuries, to the harsh and ugly ocean floor. Hardy also employs polysyndeton, or a literary device which repeats the same conjunction, in the last line. This repetition of “and” lends this final phrase a decisive rhythm like the foreboding beat of a drum, which contrasts against the smooth flow of the syntax earlier in the stanza. This shift gives the last line a mood of finality. The jewels will be left “bleared and black and blind” permanently.
“Dim moon-eyed fishes near/ Gaze at the gilded gear/ And query: "What does this vaingloriousness down here?"
Hardy uses dialogue twice in this poem, once with this fish, and then, in the last stanza, when the “Spinner of the Years” says “Now!” (31-32). These moments distinguish the poem from lyric poetry, which centers a first-person speaker. Although we get a sense of the cynical, detached tone the speaker takes towards the tragedy, the poem doesn’t center their individual character, but instead features a number of voices. Here, the fish are characterized as “dim” and “moon-eyed,” which paints them as defined by their “lightless” environment (12). Their question, “What does this vaingloriousness down here?” catalyzes a major shift in the poem, which switches from describing the sunken ship, to how the ship came to sink in the first place.
“Well: while was fashioning/ This creature of cleaving wing”
In most of “The Convergence of the Twain,” Hardy uses grammatical, if sometimes convoluted, syntax. Here, with “while was fashioning,” he breaks that pattern by neglecting to include a subject to perform the action of “fashioning.” The unnamed subject is the engineers and builders who designed and created the Titanic. By choosing not to name that subject, even if it makes for a strange-sounding sentence, the speaker implies that the humans who made the ship were unimportant, despite their own pride. Instead, the speaker refers to the Titanic as a “creature,” casting it as a being of its own right, one that came into existence the way that animals and humans do, through the broader laws of the natural world, rather than individual human skill.
“By paths coincident/ On being anon twin halves of one august event”
In the poem’s penultimate, or second to last, stanza, Hardy layers a metaphor and an allusion over the collision itself. With “paths coincident,” he suggests astrological movement, as though the ship and the iceberg were two cosmic bodies moving through the heavens rather than two earthly bodies moving over the sea. This metaphor suggests that the crash was governed by some natural law, in the same way that the movements of the stars and planets are dictated by gravity. The next line shifts from this astrological metaphor to an allusion to Plato’s Symposium, and Aristophanes’ story of the origin of man, in which some people were originally both male and female until the gods split them in two, creating soulmates. This allusion again suggests that the ship and the iceberg were fated to meet, but exchanges the fate of natural law for a mythical register. By using both metaphor and allusion here, Hardy avoids giving one specific explanation for the crash in favor of invoking several different kinds of fate. This suggests that the “Spinner of the Years” operates beyond what any individual human explanation can account for.
