Summary
In the eighth stanza, Hardy draws a parallel between the Titanic and the Iceberg. People built the Titanic, day by day constructing a larger, more beautiful, and more decorated ship. At the same time, far away in the ocean, the Iceberg was growing ever larger. In the ninth, the speaker remarks that the two appeared “alien,” or totally unrelated to one another. No “mortal eye,” or person, could anticipate that the fates of the Iceberg and the ship were intertwined.
Analysis
In stanza eight, Hardy’s syntax serves to emphasize the parallel he is drawing between the iceberg and the Titanic. First, Hardy's capitalization of "Iceberg" makes it into a proper noun—a distinct and singular object, just like the Titanic. And by using the word “grew” in both the first line of the stanza (to describe the Titanic) and the third line (to describe the iceberg), the poem suggests that the two are fundamentally similar (22, 24). More specifically, Hardy’s choice to describe both the iceberg and the ship as growing suggests that, although it might seem like the two are built through very different processes—one built by man and the other naturally occurring—they are actually made in fundamentally the same way: through God or fate.
The eighth stanza uses alliteration of both the /s/ and the /sh/ sound. This adds to the cohesive theme of the stanza, by aesthetically tying together the descriptions of the ship and the iceberg. Additionally, the slippery /s/ and /sh/ sounds create a foreboding tone. Hardy also repeats phrases of three stressed words, “smart ship grew,” “stature, grace, and hue,” and “shadowy silent distance” (22-24). These phrases give the stanza a sense of rhythm, even though Hardy does not conform to a strict meter. Additionally, they suggest an implicit comparison between the descriptions used for the ship and for the iceberg. The smartness, stature, grace, and hue of the ship all appear less impressive in light of the foreboding, shadowy mass of the iceberg.
The ninth stanza is deeply ironic. Hardy specifically employs dramatic irony, in which the difference between what the audience knows and what the subject of the poem knows differs, in order to create tension. Here, we realize that the iceberg will destroy the Titanic, but the people who build the Titanic have no knowledge of their fated meeting. This irony also creates a dynamic of foreshadowing within the poem. Although this stanza takes place before the collision, it is not written as though the speaker thinks there is any possibility of the Titanic not crashing. Instead, the dramatic irony creates tension because the speaker positions the collision as inevitable, so the reader knows more than the proud people who assumed their ship had no relationship to the dangers of the natural world. With the phrase “no mortal eye could see,” Hardy further suggests that, although the builders of the Titanic had no idea what would happen, fate, an immortal eye, already knew (26).
In the last line of the ninth stanza, Hardy makes a clever pun at the expense of the Titanic. The “intimate welding” literally refers to the crash of the ship and the iceberg (27). Yet the phrase also suggests the process through which the Titanic was built, because “welding” suggests mechanical construction. By describing the construction of the ship, in the eighth stanza, as a kind of growing, but the crash as “welding,” Hardy displaces the rationality and control of engineering from the human builders of the Titanic to the divine will which engineers its crash with the iceberg.
