Thomas Hardy
The Convergence of the Twain
This poem was written about one of the worse tragedies of our time, the sinking of the Titanic. Right from the beginning he talks about the ship herself and her fate: “
In solitude of the sea/Deep from human vanity,/And the pride if Life that planned her, stilly couches she.” I feel that the vanity in which he talks about was the way she was built and the men around her. She was the biggest ship of her time, and the builders boasted she was unsinkable, a very arrogant and costly claim considering the outcome. Now the ship is at the bottom of the sea away from all the boasting and glamour. In stanza 7 he talks about what befell her, the iceberg.” Prepared a sinister mate/ For her-so gaily great-/A Shape of Ice, for the time far and dissociate”. As we all know from history the ship had received many warnings about icebergs, but they ignored them and it eventually led to their fate. I have always been fascinated with the Titanic, I was always struck by mans arrogance and sense of entitlement when it came to controlling things that were totally uncontrollable. There would not have been as many death on that ship had there been enough lifeboats, that is true, but the sense of greatness they had, to not even include them, shows that man has yet to conquer his greatest challenge, his own vanity.
In solitude of the sea/Deep from human vanity,/And the pride if Life that planned her, stilly couches she.” I feel that the vanity in which he talks about was the way she was built and the men around her. She was the biggest ship of her time, and the builders boasted she was unsinkable, a very arrogant and costly claim considering the outcome. Now the ship is at the bottom of the sea away from all the boasting and glamour. In stanza 7 he talks about what befell her, the iceberg.” Prepared a sinister mate/ For her-so gaily great-/A Shape of Ice, for the time far and dissociate”. As we all know from history the ship had received many warnings about icebergs, but they ignored them and it eventually led to their fate. I have always been fascinated with the Titanic, I was always struck by mans arrogance and sense of entitlement when it came to controlling things that were totally uncontrollable. There would not have been as many death on that ship had there been enough lifeboats, that is true, but the sense of greatness they had, to not even include them, shows that man has yet to conquer his greatest challenge, his own vanity.
posted by jim @ 3:44 PM
2 Comments
2 Comments:
Jim,
Some good observations and comments on Hardy's poem help this post. There are a number of factors that hurt it, though, and that I should hope you would have addressed by now: the quotations lack context or citations for line numbers, the analysis tends to restate more than deeply explore the quotations, and there are numerous issues in grammar, syntax, punctuation and spelling that combine to give a less than positive impression for your reader.
I think Hardy also intended to show the iceberg as a kind of foil for the Titanic. The iceberg seems to counteract the audacity and the vanity of men by sinking humanity's greatest creation. The message seems to be a warning for humanity: we shouldn't have such pride in our own power. In this case, nature triumphs in a big way!
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