The Sea Floor (Motif)
Much of the visual imagery in “The Convergence of the Twain” centers around the sea floor. In stanzas three and four, Hardy uses long strings of adjectives to describe the bottom of the ocean. The poem describes this place as disgusting and grimy, populated by “grotesque” sea worms and sunken jewels that are now “lightless,” “bleared and black and blind" (9, 12). The second stanza presents a somewhat different image when it refers to “rhythmic tidal lyres”; here the speaker seems to find some kind of beauty in the currents deep beneath the surface of the sea (6). All this description renders the ocean floor more vivid than the Titanic itself within the poem. As happened literally with the Titanic, the presence of the ship in "The Convergence of the Twain" is overcome by the ocean into which it sinks.
The Sinking of the Titanic (Allegory)
One impact of the detached tone of the speaker is that the individual tragedy of the sinking of the Titanic is elided in favor of looking at the collision as emblematic of a broader narrative. In “The Convergence of the Twain,” the futile voyage of the Titanic stands in for human vanity more broadly. The collision with the iceberg, and the destruction of the Titanic, thus implies that all human vanity comes to nothing when confronted with omnipotent of fate.
