Summary
The first stanza begins after the collision, with the Titanic already deep below the sea. Once the object of so much human pride, the famous vessel is now alone on the ocean floor, far away from humans and their inventive vanity. The ship rests still and silent at the bottom of the sea, untouched by mankind. The Titanic’s steel engines, which used to hold the hot, immortal fires that powered the ship, have gone cold. Now deep sea currents of ice cold water thread through her bowels. The water flowing through the pipes makes a sound like the music of a harp.
Analysis
The fragmentation and rigid lyric structure of “The Convergence of the Twain” are apparent just from looking at the printed poem. The poem is divided into twelve stanzas separated by roman numerals. Each stanza is three lines long; the first two are shorter, usually between six and eight syllables, and the last longer, of about thirteen syllables. This difference in length is visually accented by the indentation of the first two lines, which further offsets the third from the rest. The first two stanzas establish the AAA rhyme scheme that holds for the entire work, in which each final syllable in the stanza rhymes.
Because the poem is divided up numerically, the individual stanzas do not flow from one to the next but instead stand on their own, almost as miniature poems within the poem. Although the subtitle “Lines on the Loss of the ‘Titanic’” unambiguously establishes Hardy’s subject, the first stanza backs off from this certainty. The ship isn’t named until the last word of the stanza, and then only as “she,” following nautical grammatical convention (3). This vagueness establishes the impersonal tone of the poem, which is less preoccupied with the lives lost in the sinking of the Titanic than it is in the broader philosophical concerns brought up by the disaster. That point is driven in by the fact that the poem begins after the ship has already sunk, a timeline that sidelines the human tragedy in favor of inanimate actors.
Beginning with the Titanic at the bottom of the sea also establishes the ocean floor, rather than the ship itself, as the poem’s setting. Hardy uses alliterated /s/ sounds to hint at the soft sounds of the waves. By describing the sunken ship as “Deep from human vanity,” rather than the more natural “far from,” he emphasizes the vastness of the ocean (2). That vastness is also responsible for the ship’s solitude; the Titanic is only alone because the seafloor extends out so far in all directions beyond it. The first stanza draws a contrast between this endless, silent underwater world, and the distant human vanity which holds sway only on land. “The Convergence of the Twain” focuses on the archetypal conflict of “man vs. nature,” but that doesn’t mean the poem is about specific people. The capitalization of “Pride of Life” indicates that this is a personified figure (3). The active subject in the third line isn’t a person, but Pride itself, which planned the ship.
It isn’t until the second stanza that this poem about the Titanic actually gets specific about the ship. Hardy’s original audience, the patrons of a charity fundraiser, likely expected a sentimental account of the sunken vessel, something that would dwell with the tragedy of the event. Instead, Hardy maintains a roundly neutral tone, and even finds beauty in the sunken ship. He uses the word “pyres,” which most commonly describes the structure on which a corpse is burned, to describe the engines (4). Yet instead of bodies, the fire these engines contained was “salamandrine,” home to the salamander which, in folklore, was thought to live in fire (5). Hardy thus associates the driving force behind the Titanic with both death and the most unlikely of lives. When water floods the ship, it extinguishes that paradoxical construction and replaces it with the simple sound of the harp.
