It has been years since I was asked to analyze a literary work, so I chose Thomas Hardy's "The Convergence of Twain" as a jumping in point for the purpose of this blog. The setting of the sinking of The Titanic is familiar to me and was more accesible and easier to reason with than some of his other works.
I found the structure of the work to be important as it moves through XI stanzas, where in the final stanza it sounds on "the Spinner of the Years" as it "jars two hemispheres." This representation of fate or even Murphy's law is reduced to the "spinning" of time and the movements of planets and stars spinning in the sky. Moving backwards into stanza X, he asks the question whether this is meant to be or a mear coincidence that these two amazing feats, a monstrous iceberg and the greatest ocean-liner of its time, met on so specific a spot to such a specific and horrific end. In Stanza VIII he compares the two vessels as they both grow "In stature, grace, and hue" symbolically tying them to the same fate. As we move further back into stanza VI, Hardy calls on fate again as "the Immanent Will that stirs and urges everything" and the "sinister mate" prepared for her in stanza VII.
The opening stanzas reflect on the moments come to pass as the ship lays at the bottom of the ocean with sea creatures looking on in bemusement and "indifference". It shows the purposes of such "opulent" things and "Jewels in joy"and how skewed those purposes become in an environment as alien as the bottom of the Atlantic. And finally, in the opening stanza it shows how such opulence, when stripped away of its vanity, is nothing more or less than "the Pride of Life".
Again, I found this work easier to approach than the others because it dealt with something I could more closely relate historically than his others. However, I could see this piece as becoming a catalyst of understanding for his more challenging works.
