Summary
In the third stanza, Hardy describes the fate of the sunken Titanic’s interior. The ship was loaded with beautiful mirrors owned by wealthy passengers. Instead of reflecting their faces, hideous sea worms crawl across the mirrors’ glassy surfaces. The ugly worms spread slime, indifferent to their own reflections and closed off to the world. Similarly lost are the jewels designed to delight affluent customers with their sparkle and shine. In the darkness of the deep sea, with no light to reflect, they cease to be beautiful.
Analysis
The third stanza moves from the bowels of the ship to its cabins, from the cold mechanics that powered it to the expensive cargo it carried. Rather than narrating the deaths of the wealthy passengers, the poem only implies their presence through their possessions, which have made their way, with the ship, to the lonely bottom of the sea. Much like the ship itself, the commodities of the wealthy were manufactured with ambitious intent. In the collision, these things “meant” for the wealthy have now been destroyed by the superior power of the natural world.
The “Convergence of the Twain” is a satirical poem—it uses irony to parody and critique its subject. That really comes to the forefront in this stanza, where the presence of mirrors signals the irony Hardy sees in the sinking of the Titanic. Mirrors service the vanity of the wealthy, the same “human vanity” that planned the disastrous ship (2). In the second line of this stanza, Hardy uses “glass” as a verb, meaning to glaze or encase in glass (8). The mirror is thus metaphorically depicted, not as a flat surface, but as a vessel; it was meant to contain the wealthy, not just to reflect their faces. This is another way that Hardy renders the poem impersonal—the “opulent” aren’t characters of their own right, but are instead faces caught in glass (8).
In contrast to the stripped-down way Hardy describes the wealthy, the horrors below the sea are illustrated in vivid, even excessive, detail. The sea-worms which crawl over the mirror indifferently embody the cold, unfeeling ocean, which stands opposed to the vain humans who stare into the mirror. They are also “dumb,” or unable to speak, paralleling the silent, solitary ocean itself (9).
The fourth stanza mirrors the third in its themes and form. Hardy returns to the theme of planning with the word “designed” which, like “meant” in the previous stanza, points to the relationship between human vanity and planning for the future (7, 10). This is the fallacy that led to the construction of the “unsinkable” Titanic—plans for the future disregard forces that humanity cannot control, like fate. The stanza ends with another list of ocean adjectives, much like “grotesque, slimed, dumb, indifferent” sea-worms (9). Here, however, the alliteration of the /b/ sound and repetition of “and” makes the line sound more final (12). That air of finality both marks the end of this section of the poem, and emphasizes the finality of the disaster itself. The jewels, regardless of their purpose, are ruined forever, sunk beneath the sea.
