Student Question
What historic event does "The Convergence of the Twain" refer to and who does the poet blame?
Quick answer:
The poem "The Convergence of the Twain" refers to the sinking of the Titanic. While Hardy makes clear that human vanity and pride bear much of the blame for the tragedy, he invokes the specter of an angry God or gods. In their arrogance, humans may have created their unsinkable ship, but it takes an omnipotent "Spinner of the Years" to remind them they cannot subjugate nature.
As Thomas Hardy himself alludes to in part of the poem's title ("Lines on the loss of the Titanic"), the poem is about the doomed and "unsinkable" cruise liner the Titanic. Hardy places the blame on the shoulders of humans, but at the same time, he indicates they did not cause the accident. The cruel and omnipotent gods bear the blame, or merely the Christian God—"the Spinner of the Years." Nonetheless, Hardy makes clear that because of their "vanity," "pride," and belief they had created a ship that would declare victory over nature, the gods were forced to intervene and declare man cannot triumph over nature (God).
This idea of divine intervention is not new to Hardy, as he is wont to employ an image of an uncaring, cruel God in some of his novels, such as Tess of the D’Urbervilles . In this poem, too, Hardy posits...
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that there are unearthly influences at work:
... while was fashioning
This creature of cleaving wing,
The Immanent Will that stirs and urges everything
Prepared a sinister mate.
So while humans created their supposedly invincible ship, it was the "Immanent Will" that forged the iceberg, the ship’s "mate." Hardy continues to contrast and separate humans and the gods later in the poem:
No mortal eye could see
The intimate welding of their later history.
Blinded by their limitations as human beings and by their arrogance, humans cannot see. The natural corollary is that the gods—the immortals—could and did see. But this is not much of a revelation, since, after all, God says, "Now!" and "jars two hemispheres."
What historic event does "The Convergence of the Twain" refer to, and who is at fault?
Throughout the poem, fate is personified as an omnipotent and malevolent force. In the sixth stanza, the speaker refers to fate as the "Immanent Will that stirs and urges everything." Fate "Prepare[s] a sinister mate" for the Titanic, the "mate" being the iceberg that sinks the ship. The fact that fate prepares the iceberg, intending for it to sink the ship, suggests that fate is malevolent. Later in the poem, fate is referred to again, but this time as "the Spinner of the Years" who says "Now!" With that word, it brings together the iceberg and the ship. The force of the collision, and thus the forcefulness of fate's command, is so powerful as to "jar... two hemispheres."
Elsewhere in the poem, Hardy also suggests that the construction of the Titanic, then the largest cruise ship in the world, was an example of mankind overreaching itself and being too proud and too boastful of its abilities. Indeed, the ship is described scornfully as "this vaingloriousness" and "this creature of cleaving wing." The implication is that fate "prepared" the iceberg as a sort of cruel lesson or reprimand for mankind. Just as Icarus's wings melted when he flew too close to the sun and just as Prometheus was punished by the gods when he gave the gift of fire to mankind, so too the sinking of the Titanic serves as a reminder, courtesy of fate, that mankind should know and respect its limits.