FREE ESSAY ON THAMAS HARDYS, THE CONVERGEANCE OF TWAIN

THAMAS HARDYS, THE CONVERGEANCE OF TWAIN

Thomas Hardy experienced great difficulty believing in a forgiving, Christian God because
of the pain and suffering he witnessed around him. He also endured some pain, with the
loss of his wife and suffering during the five years he spent in London that made him
ill. As a young man, Hardy wanted to become a clergyman. This vocation was quite a turn
around of what he pursued--a career as a famous agnostic writer. He lost faith in his
religious, Victorian upbringing. As such, he shared a belief with many modern poets in
the futility and waste of human existence. Hardy did believe in a supreme being or as he
liked to call him The Immanent Will, but he did not think of Him as a forgiving God like
other Christians. Instead, Hardy believed Him to be portrayed as a vengeful God, which we
learn from his poem, The Convergence of the Twain: (Lines on the loss of the 'Titanic').
Thomas Hardy wrote this poem with a very noticeable chronological disruption midway
through the poem. Unlike most poets who keep their poems in chronological order to
maintain suspense throughout the poem, Hardy believed that the subject of the Titanic was
so well known that there was not any reason to keep the readers in suspense of what
impending doom awaited the Titanic. Instead, he commenced his poem with a description of
the Titanic at present: grotesque, slimed, dumb, indifferent(st III). Then he proceeds to
the fashioning(st VI) of the famous ship and continues to that famous April evening where
the consummation(st XI) of the two titanic masses occurred--the grand ship made from
human hands and the silent iceberg made by the Immanent Will(st VI).
Hardy does not confine himself inside the walls of set syllables per verse; every stanza
has a different number of syllables in each verse. In the first part of his poem the
rhythm is very alluring. With proper uses of caesuras, stresses and slacks, Hardy seems
to capture the solitude of the sea that he is describing with his steady, gentle sway of
words, a rhythmic tidal lyre(st II). While reading this poem, the words seem to move
persistently slowly up and down like the tide:
I
In a solitude of the sea
Deep from human vanity,
And the Pride of life that planned her, stilly couches she. (lines 1-3)
Hardy also numbers all of the eleven stanzas of his poem. The numbering indicates the
separation of each one of the stanzas as if to imply that we have to look at this poem as
eleven different poems in one. This method gives us a chance to understand the poem more
efficiently by studying one stanza at a time. A first reading of the poem would reveal
five stanzas describing the gilded gear(st V) at the bottom of the sea and six stanzas
that refer to the ship and to the iceberg converging at a point so far and dissociate(st
VII). However, an enjambment occurs between stanza VI and stanza VII, as if these two
stanzas were meant to be one: The Immanent Will that stirs and urges everything /
Prepared a sinister mate(lines 18/19). Ironically, these two stanzas describe both the
creation of the ship and the creation of the iceberg that are destined to come together
later in time.
Hardy takes more of an antithetical approach toward the story of the Titanic than most
people think of or 'chose' to think of when they hear of the tragedy. Most people want
the story to be told through a tragic, yet romantic, point of view that relates the
tragedy of the men, women, and children who were lost on that gruesome night. People
relate emotionally to the story of the Titanic by watching the movie that was released in
the past year because it is from the point of view of the people on the ship. We see a
romantic mood portrayed be the people on the ship and the tragedy suffered in the loss of
their loved ones. Consequently, Hardy does not want us to share in this travesty that
they have experienced. Instead of a tragic poem of the people involved in this tragic
event, Hardy distances himself from the picture, far enough just to see the two grand and
noble objects, a Godlike view solely focused on the two gigantic entities.
Through his poem, Hardy explains to us that it is a vengeful God that planned the
collision. In the section of the poem that contrasts both the development of the ship and
of the iceberg, Hardy points out some human vanity. The era when the 'Titanic' was built
was a time that the production of goods was rapidly evolving. Everything had to be made
to be faster, larger, stronger and more efficient thus resulting in the building of the
Titanic. This grand and opulent(st III) machine represented a spectacular symbol of power
that was not a match for God. Humans thought themselves to be so evolved that they were
above Him. God, on the other hand, heard these vain remarks and decided to play a game
with the people. God challenged the humans creation of the greatest mass on the water
with His own. So He played with the humans gigantic toy with his own water toy--a great
iceberg. Therefore, as a small child would do, He smashed them together with some sort of
a destructive nature:
VIII
And as the smart ship grew
In stature, grace, and hue,
In shadowy silent distance grew the Iceberg too. (lines 22-24)
Hence, the Spinner of the Years(st XI), another metaphor used by Hardy to refer to the
'supreme being' as a vengeful God; upon hearing the vain cries of man clamouring, I'm the
king on the world! as in the movie Titanic God responds as in the poem, with the event
when God said now!(st XI) and render unto mankind the knowledge that He is the ultimate
King of everything. Accordingly, God sends this vaingloriousness made by humans down to
the bottom of the sea as a symbol of the vanity of the age thereby, indicating his power
over human vanity.