On April 14, 1912, the RMS Titanic, a luxury cruise liner thought to be “unsinkable,” collided with an iceberg and sunk to the bottom of the Atlantic. More than 1,500 of the 2,240 passengers and crew onboard lost their lives. Just nine days later, the English novelist and poet Thomas Hardy completed “The Convergence of the Twain” in response to the tragic event.
The poem was originally written for a charity concert directed at raising funds for victims of the crash, and it was first published as part of the program for that event. Two years later, the poem finally found a more conventional home in the pages of Hardy’s Satires of Circumstance. In those early days, it must not have offered much comfort to the bereaved victims of the Titanic’s fall. “The Convergence of the Twain” is distant and analytical, nodding to the hubris of the great ship without sparing a thought for the lives lost in the disaster. Instead of human actors, the poem focuses on the iceberg and ship, and describes their collision as inevitable, even conjugal.
Hardy was one of many Romantic poets to respond to the disaster in verse, and he was not the only one to focus on the theatrical and Biblical notes to the sinking of the Titanic. Yet of all these, “The Convergence of the Twain” has proven the most lasting. It is unique in its lack of sentimentality, the cold, impersonal tragedy it paints. More than a century later, critics continue to debate the morality of this approach, the complex classical knowledge base it draws on, and the allegorical and religious dimensions of the poem. Although the poem leaves room for debate, it nevertheless offers a clear alternative to the clichés of Romantic poetry, one that focuses on fate over free will, and which perceives love and tragedy alike not as emblems of the greatness of the human spirit, but as forces subject to a universe which is ultimately indifferent.
