Summary
Near the ship, fish peer at the wreck, their eyes dim in the darkness of the deep sea. They see the pieces of the ship, made of ordinary metal but coated with a thin layer of gold, and wonder at how such a proud vessel came to rest at the bottom of the ocean. In the next stanza, the speaker begins to answer that question. While mankind was busy creating the ship that now lies broken in half on the ocean floor, there was another, more powerful force at play. The speaker names this force the “Immanent Will,” something inside and around everything with the power to change anything about the universe. It watched the proud fashioning of the Titanic and prepared its “sinister mate”—the iceberg that would destroy it (19).
Analysis
In the first four stanzas of “The Convergence of the Twain,” Hardy establishes a distant, ironic tone partly through the absence of any human character or perspective. The speaker speaks from a distance, cooly evaluating the ship beneath the sea. In the fifth stanza, that distance breaks for the first time with the introduction of the fish. Now, the gaze of the speaker is mediated through their eyes; the personified fish even ask the poem’s central introspective question: “What does this vaingloriousness down here”? (15).
On one hand, this change makes the poem a little more approachable, welcoming the reader into the ocean world where the wreck dwells, rather than forcing us to remain at the cold distance of an omniscient speaker. At the same time, the fish are no more sympathetic to the human loss represented by the wreck of the Titanic than the speaker is; rather than mourning the dead, they point cynically to the “vaingloriousness,” or vanity, embodied in the construction of the ship itself (15). The physical image of fish only compounds this impression. They are cold, slippery, and wet, in total opposition to warm human beings on the land. The shift from distant narrator to judgmental fish prepares the reader not for the warm embrace of sentimentalism, but for an even colder and more cynical tone towards the tragedy.
That tone takes on its full significance in the pivotal sixth stanza. Because Hardy divided “The Convergence of the Twain” into eleven sections, this sixth stanza marks the central point of the poem. Thus, on a formal level, Hardy suggests that these three lines form the poem’s fulcrum, the place where the poem fundamentally shifts. Indeed, at this crucial structural point, the content of the poem does shift as the speaker moves from setting the scene to answering a specific question. The central line of this central stanza, “This creature of cleaving wing,” is especially important (17). The word cleaving is a contranym, a word that means its own opposite, here both “to split in two” and “to stick fast to.” Hardy exploits this self-contradiction to build the dark irony of the poem; at once the iceberg cleaves the Titanic in two, and the Titanic cleaves to the iceberg.
In the seventh stanza, Hardy expands on the personification implicit to the traditional use of female pronouns for ships in order to cast the Titanic as a bride. By capitalizing “A Shape of Ice,” Hardy signals that the iceberg itself is similarly personified within the logic of the poem, functioning as an actor rather than merely an object (21). The shorter first two lines of the stanzaic structure of “The Convergence of the Twain” here come to suggest the coupling of the ship and her deadly groom, as “sinister mate” rhymes with and sits directly above “so gaily great,” the poet’s moniker for the Titanic itself (20). At the same time, the introduction of “The Immanent Will” in the previous stanza reminds the reader that neither the Titanic nor the Shape of Ice are independent actors. Instead, they are a couple willed together by a force more powerful than either: fate.
