Thomas Hardy

Thomas Hardy seems to be a person who looked at a glass of water and said that it was half empty. During his lifetime, he wrote both poetry and fiction but seemed to add a flavor of darkness in most of these works. Most of his topics were related to how the universe was to have a hostile and terrible fate which is seen in his works.

I enjoyed reading his poem, “The Convergence of the Twain”. This sparked an interest in me after reading the subtitle “Line on the loss of the ‘Titanic’” because this happens to be one of my favorite movies of all time and I was interested to see Hardy’s interpretation of this tragic incident.

When I was reading each of the verses of this poem I noticed a trend. The first two lines seemed to be describing the wonderful features and positive attitudes of the ship while the last line ended with a dark note contradicting the two precious lines. This may not be true for all of the verses, but it defiantly seems to be this way for the first eight.

“In a solitude of the sea/ Deep from human vanity,/ And the Pride of Life that planned her, stilly couches she.” When I read this first verse, I felt like Hardy was saying that the pride of the people that built this fantastic ship was the cause for the ship to sink. This statement is better supported after the eighth verse. It seemed that the boat had become so big and almighty, even as the iceberg grew bigger, it was still unable to be seen. I think that Hardy tried to have a moral in the story that is bigger than that of just the story of the Titanic. I think he was trying to say that pride gets in the way of judgment. Those people who think that they are better than others may get crushed by someone and not even see it coming.

This poem ends with, “Till the Spinner of the Years/ Said ‘Now!’ And each one hears,/ And consummation comes, and jars to hemispheres”. I think this is yet another lesson that Hardy is trying to convey to his audience. I believe this is suppose to mean that when things come together and meet; they will be forever linked to each other just like the iceberg and the Titanic. This linkage can either be tragic as seen in this example or it can be positive.