THOMAS HARDY
[1840–1928]
The Convergence of the Twain
Lines on the Loss of the Titanic
Thomas Hardy (1840–1928) was born in a cottage in Higher Bockhampton, Dorset, near the regional market town of Dorchester in southwestern England. Apprenticed at age sixteen to an architect, he spent most of the next twenty years restoring old churches. Having always had an interest in literature, he started writing novels in his thirties, publishing more than a dozen, including Tess of the D’Urbervilles (1891) and Jude the Obscure (1895). In 1896 Hardy gave up prose and turned to poetry, writing verse until his death at age eighty-eight. He had a consistently bleak, even pessimistic, outlook on life. Many of his works stress the dark effects of “hap” (happenstance, coincidence) in the world, a central motif in “The Convergence of the Twain.”
1
In a solitude of the sea
Deep from human vanity,
And the Pride of Life that planned her, stilly couches she.
2
Steel chambers, late the pyres
Of her salamandrine fires,
Cold currents thrid, and turn to rhythmic tidal lyres.
3
Over the mirrors meant
To glass the opulent
The sea-worm crawls—grotesque, slimed, dumb, indifferent.
4
Jewels in joy designed
To ravish the sensuous mind
Lie lightless, all their sparkles bleared and black and blind.
5
Dim moon-eyed fishes near
Gaze at the gilded gear
And query: “What does this vaingloriousness down here?”
6
Well: while was fashioning
This creature of cleaving wing,
The Immanent Will that stirs and urges everything
7
Prepared a sinister mate
For her—so gaily great—
A Shape of Ice, for the time far and dissociate.
8
And as the smart ship grew
In stature, grace, and hue,
In shadowy silent distance grew the Iceberg too.
9
Alien they seemed to be:
No mortal eye could see
The intimate welding of their later history,
10
Or sign that they were bent
By paths coincident
On being anon twin halves of one august event,
11
Till the Spinner of the Years
Said “Now!” And each one hears,
And consummation comes, and jars two hemispheres.