Copyright Heldref Publications Winter 1995Incontrovertibly, Thomas Hardy's poem "The Convergence of the Twain: (Lines on the Loss of the Titanic)" likens the encounter between the "unsinkable" Titanic and the iceberg that rammed and sank her in 1912 to an ironic wedding involving the ship (a "she" on her "maiden" voyage) and her cosmically prepared "sinister mate" (line 19). Hardy cultivates this conceit in such details as "stilly couches she" (3); "intimate welding [cf. 'wedding'] of their...history" (27); "twin halves of one august event" (30); and "...each one hears, / And consummation comes..." (32-33). My argument is that implicit bawdry in the poem's close amplifies this dominant conceit--skewing it toward the humorous and thus inviting reconsiderations of tone, of literary precedents and analogs, and of meaning in the poem.
Though Hardy's last line--"And consummation comes, and jars two hemispheres" (33)--most obviously means "the climactic union is earthshaking," it also adumbrates a scene in which two globular "hemispheres" are "jarred" in the physical act of sexual climax; paired "global" buttocks seem likeliest and funniest to envision, but labia might do. This farcical scenario, with its quivering body parts, triggers the bawdy denotation of "comes"--as well as the pun "Consummation comes, injures ['enjars'] two hemispheres." Thus sexual meanings multiply, partly because a "jar" had pudendal suggestiveness. While the easier interpretation is that a lower pair of the "bride's" semi-orbs take a vigorous beating, the pun may also mean that the act "enjars" the ravager's testicles, so that they are either lost to sight or incapacitated, or both. Whatever the case, Hardy's coy, politically incorrect wit about a ravaging phallic onslaught encourages tittering.
Finding such sexual wit in line 33 helps readers to uncover latent humor cavorting elsewhere in the text. For example, the "steel chambers" (4) that the "cold currents" play on and turn into "rhythmic...lyres"--like ironic Eolian harps--are suggestive not only of pudenda but also of chastity belts; "cold currents" is nicely congruent with the idea that the ravisher is an invasive "Shape of Ice" (21), hard but not warm, and thus well matched with his "steel chambered" victim.
The "seaworms"--which are "grotesque, slimed, dumb, indifferent" (9) as they play inside the still form of the battered ship on her marriage bed (and deathbed)--are also consistent with phallic humor. As little analogs to the larger phallic interloper, perhaps the invasive worms are "in[-]different" because they "entered in a different manner." More certainly, the phrase "Jewels...designed / To ravish..." (10-11) suggests testicles, building on the folk kenning "family jewels." If the "consummation" has indeed effected "injury" by strewing such "jewels" about the ocean floor, then the epithet "gilded gear" (14) of the next stanza surely asserts a pun on "gelded," while the pun on "showy apparatus" suggests sexual equipment (like a fancy codpiece). Even the "fishes"--with longstanding pudendal overtones in folk humor--seem fishy here; and their question "What does this vaingloriousness down here?" (15) is funny because "vaingloriousness" (cf. "vein-...") stands as another phallic epithet, with "down here" suggesting "in the lower extremities." Finally, the epithet "creature of cleaving wing" (17) momentarily seems to rename the erstwhile mate's "gilded gear," though it logically refers to the ship herself.
The image of large creatures mating seems inherently funny anyway, and phallic wit easily surfaces in a story about a female ripped apart by an oversized mate. Thus the phrase "intimate welding" (27) is comic for adumbrating a huge, mating pair stuck together for life in the throes of a cold, mechanistic passion. The epithet "creature of cleaving wing" (17) punningly suggests, further, that the Titanic was a huge winged angel before her ravishment, and in this context her "sinister mate" seems like another Lucifer, so that the familiar scene in Book I of Milton's Paradise Lost depicting fallen monsters on a "burning lake" becomes one ironic antecedent for the poem. Small ironies occur because the sexual instrument that ripped the ship's membrane was icy, not hot with passion, and because a "creature of cleaving wing" (17)--made to cut through the waters--was herself "cleaved."
Just as "sinister mate" (19) seems to pun on "sin" (cf. "sins tear mate"), other "strained" puns about the "evils" of sex are latent in the poem's closing lines: e.g., "... each one here sinn/ed" and c--ts you may shun" (32-33, in "each one hears, / And..." and "consummation"). Further "low" wordplays dot the poem. The Obtruding iceberg is "so gaily great" (20)--the pun on soggily..." suggesting both "in the water" and "flaccidly." Sexual wit may also inhere in the Hopkins-like pun "No...eye could see/.../...sign that ship and iceberg were bent..." (26-28, my emphasis), since "bent" suggests "engaged in sex," "crooked" (cf. "sinful"), and "humped" like the hemispheres of the last line. More generally, the image of things "big" and "reddened" that is latent in "grew / In stature, grace [grease?], and hue" implies the sexual ripening of both partners--with bawdy overtones (22-24).
There is certainly no doubt that Hardy's mind operates here with attention to puns and close plays on sounds. The phrase "Shape of Ice" (21), for example, punningly echoes "Ship," much as "Will" (18) echoes "Well" (16)--the latter a witty pun on "deep hole full of water." The
implicit "wedding/welding" interplay shows a similar sensitivity to playful sound patterns, as do the pairs "Titanic" and "tidal" (6); "stilly" and "Steel" (3, 4); and perhaps, "their hi[gh]story" and "august event" (paralleled in 27 and 30). Even the phrase "far and dissociate" (21, my emphasis) slyly embeds "foreign." Though readers may gag at the pun "Teat-antic," the poem's terminal emphasis on a maiden's shaking half-globes shows a licentious, jot-and-tittle craftsman whose quick mind might have noted it. If so, the poet's "sub-titular" pun on "the loss of the teat-antic" may refer to his own suppressed "breast-joke." Just as "consummation" (33) embeds the pun "c--ts you may shun," even so the poem's title harbors other "country" puns of an ilk more readily associated with Renaissance writings that with those of Hardy's day. The fact is that Hardy's title may be read as a playful phonic code embedding such bawdry as these examples:
The C on vergen ce of the T wain Thick on virgin, see oaf that wane! The c--t, virgin see, oaf! That way in! The c--t, virgin, sieve. That way in! The son, virgin see-[They] Oft heat, wane. This on virgin see: Oaf that wane.
Accepting such far-fetched humor as authorized (or at least as subtextual, "Freudian" potentialities) may be made somewhat easier by recalling that the playful "shaped verse" context is cultivated by a jokester in a similarly witty spirit: Each stanza in this "serious" poem strikes the eye as a rudimentary sinking ship--replete with a stanza-number smokestack, and about to go under the waves. Each stanza, further, comprises two formal units (lines 1 and 2) that "converge" into a third entity (line 3) with twice the associated matter--wittily echoing the poem's topic incident.
Dr. Samuel Johnson would have surely condemned Hardy's "violent" linkage of apparently "dissociate" materials (cf. 21) as "false wit." This linkage, I argue, imitates the violence of the Titanic incident itself, when a crafted human artifact rammed head-on into Nature. This linkage is also one of the main implicit themes in "The Convergence of the Twain," making the poem, like Coleridge's "Kubla Khan," an exemplary comment on the role of the artist in controlling materials and creating his conflicted world. Certainly the clash of sober human aims (represented by the ship) and the grotesquely disruptive effects of willful cosmic playfulness find analogs in Hardy's absurdist convergence of sober matter and disparate wit. In this light, "the Pride of Life" (3), "Immanent Will" (18), and "Spinner of the Years" (31) become epithets that apply to the creative poet, master of his own universe, manipulating its elements, however perversely, to instruct and entertain. The Cosmic Jokester who sank the Titanic finds a manipulative counterpart,
believe, in the playful poet who obviously takes much delight in setting down the incident and teasing his incredulous audience.
-ROY NEIL GRAVES, University of Tennesee at Martin
My Research