Thomas Hardy and the Titanic


How’s that for counter-programming to SB XLI ? Before the current spotlight fades on Hardy, I wanted to note his poetry. Like Robert Graves, his first love was his poems, not the novels that paid the bills.

I don’t remember when I first read Hardy’s “Convergence of the Twain—Lines on the loss the Titanic,” but it is a haunting poem whose theme, unexpectedly, offers a comforting way to look at heartache.

Kipling put the word twain (from Old English twegen, meaning two) on the poetic map with one of his Barrack-room Ballads in 1892, declaring, “Oh, East is East, and West is West, and never the twain shall meet.” In 1912 the sinking of the Titanic was so overwhelming that Hardy needed to use the language of the Empire—inverted—to start to make sense of the tragedy.

He begins the poem with a harrowing description of the Titanic on the bottom of the ocean, where sea-worms crawl over the “mirrors meant to glass the opulent”; “jewels in joy designed to ravish the sensuous mind lie lightless”; and moon-eyed fishes query “What does this vaingloriousness down here?”

Hardy explains that “The Immanent Will that stirs and urges everything prepared a sinister mate” for the ship: “a Shape of Ice.”

“And as the smart ship grew
In stature, grace, and hue,
In shadowy silent distance grew the Iceberg too.”

How chilling, to think of the ship being built as the iceberg is simultaneously growing larger. In Hardy’s worldview, the twain meet in time and space when “the Spinner of Years said ‘Now!’ And each one hears, and consummation comes, and jars two hemispheres.”

As enriching as the poem is to read in relation to the actual Titanic, it offers an eerie construct for more commonly shared, pedestrian events.

Most of us have experienced a catastrophic meeting of the twain: who hasn’t been sunk by another person, particularly a love? And from the black stillness of the ocean floor, as you try to rally your senses, you start to think, how could this have happened?

Well, it happened much like Hardy imagined the epic sinking: you were growing “in stature, grace, and hue” and somewhere, so was he (or she).

Then “the Immanent Will” or fate or chance or Match.com said “Now!”: and you hit. It turns out that this, too, is a sinister mate. The extent of the injury from the impact is not immediately known (surely, there are 6 watertight compartments). But slowly you realize things are amiss, and then rapidly you are going down.

The comfort in Hardy’s poem, for me, is the sense of inevitability. The ship was built and the iceberg grew, and fate deemed they were going to hit. From that macro-view, it’s a no fault disaster.

On a person level, I can accept that a catastrophic impact was going to be a part of my history, just as the Titanic sinking is part of world history. IF he had never moved from Tennessee . . . IF I hadn’t learn to play the piano . . . IF IF IF . . . if things had been different, we twain would not have met. I would have been safer in Kipling’s world than in Hardy’s—but I didn’t get to make that choice.

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February 4th, 2007
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Viewing 5 Comments

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    The problem with Hardy is that while he was very adventurous, his musicality and word choices- esp. cliches, was not good.
    I admire his daring, but far too many of his poems concern loss and grieving over it, and are quite trite, as well poorly executed. As proof, current Poet Laureate and doggerelist Donald Hall claims Hardy as the greatest English poet- which says it all.
    I've three collections of Hardy's, one with about 30 poems, one with about 200, and one with over a 1000. He's better when extremely selective, just like Emily Dickinson. Both pretty much repeated themselves and wrote the same seven or eight poems over and again with little variation.
    With the top 20 or so of his poems in front of you, you can argue he's a good, solid- albeit nowhere near great poet. But with 1000 poems to choose from the delimited nature of his cosmos will stupefy.
    Mark Van Doren, incidentally, is one of the rare poets for whom the inverse is true, Like Hardy, I have more than one collection, and the larger collection shows he was far more daring and diverse than the shorter one does, as well a better poet than Hardy, although both were formalists.
    A similar effect happens in translations- I have 4 Pasternaks, but only one of the books reveals his greatness.
    If you read Rilke, say, you'll find his greatness transcends even bad translators liek Robert Bly, but the diff in quality shows if you compare Bly with Stephen Mitchell, or Edward Snow.
    The only translator-proof poet I've ever found is Osip Mandelstam.
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    Dan, I love the Donald Hall tidibt--thanks. I agree Hardy is not a great poet, and I don't choose his work when I need any sort of poetic fix.
    Looking at my own bookshelf I was reminded of two things: I.M.Parsons included 4 of Hardy's poems in his superb "Men Who March Away" anthology of World War 1 poets (taking the title of his colletion from Hardy); and that Paul Fussell begins "Great War and Modern Memory" with a piece by Lytton Stachey from 1914 that sounds like he is writing about the war, when he is actually reviewing Hardy's recent volume of poems, "Satires of Circumstances." From that reference Fussell unfolds his whole thesis of the development of irony through the "stages" of WWI literature, and he ends his work with Hardy. So the man's place in English letters is pretty well set.
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    I hope the "smart ship" part was sarcastic in that one. Anyway, good points being raised here, I enjoyed the short read although there's something wrong with single and double quotes on your blogs. They show up as How’s etc. in both IE and FF
    • ^
    • v
    Interesting post. I have stumbled this for my friends. Hope others find it as interesting as I did.

    Cheers
    good-jobs.org
    • ^
    • v
    hardy has been connected that ship emotionally and it's the reason why he comes up with this lovely poem, the he will always carry the injury in his heart forever.
 

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