Fated meeting

VIJAY NAMBISAN

A GREAT number of those who read this column must have seen the film Titanic. And even those who haven't are familiar with the supposed invulnerability of the ship, the appalling scale of the mid-Atlantic collision, the heroism of the hero, the heroinism (to coin a phrase) of the heroine, and so on and on. But mainstream cinema is not a medium suited to philosophical speculation, so you haven't spared a thought for the iceberg. Why was it there?

Thomas Hardy (1840-1928) knew it was there for a purpose. He believed, towards the end of his career, in the "Immanent Will" which fashions everything. He lived a long life, out through the First World War and beyond the League of Nations. He came from the warm certainties of the Victorian Age to the uncertainties of disarmament, but he didn't bother his head about such nonsense. His problem - and it was a problem, as his novels will attest - was the human condition.

This poem was written in 1912, soon after the sinking of the Titanic, when Hardy was 72. He had given up writing novels some fifteen years ago, and though many of his novels are now classics, it is perhaps for a few of his most inward-looking poems that he has a lasting place in literature.

Though he came of a well-established family, Hardy was of a radical bent of mind. We would not call it so, but his Victorian critics did. Perhaps he was different on account of not going to college: He began to work for an architect immediately after school, and he went to London soon after in the same line of business. He began writing poems then, in his twenties, and some of them have lasted. He began to write novels too; his first novel was rejected, but one of its readers was George Meredith (whose poem was discussed in this column a couple of months ago). Meredith, only a dozen years senior, told Hardy to cut down on ideology and increase the art and complexity of the plot. Hardy took the advice and, following Dickens and Thackeray, published his first few novels in serial form. By nature pessimistic, he transmuted to the "Wessex" countryside the themes of Greek tragedy. Between 1878 and 1895 he produced a series of novels so thorough in their understanding of the ordinary folk that he elevated the regional to the universal.

His heroes and heroines are often sinners; yet this was not so important to him as the fact of their being unhappy human beings. Official morality, however, was outraged, and his last two books, Tess of the D'Urbervilles (1891) and Jude the Obscure (1895), drew such criticism that Hardy swore he would write no more novels. In any case he considered his poetry of far greater value.

Hardy was not a poet who had learned to write the hard way: That is obvious. Indeed, all his poetry has a hit-or-miss quality to it, and there is no great development with age. The alliteration in this poem is an excuse for insight. As in his novels, there is an accidental technique to his poems; yet there is in the best of them a genius for the fundamentals.

In this poem, what stands out is the poet's knowledge of - you can hardly call it faith in - a higher power which may not be inclined to favour humankind. Initially Hardy thought this power entirely indifferent, but later attributed to it - or It, I should say - a self-conscious motive. Ship and iceberg were fated to meet; the liner's destiny was scripted when her keel was laid.

Yet, Hardy was a pessimistic writer, and we prefer to feel good. Though he wrote as he thought, Hardy did no wonderful things for poetry. But he was prepared to tackle the unfathomable on its own terms, as a brave man must, and in his best work we always see a great heart.

* * *

The Convergence of the Twain

(lines on the loss of the Titanic)

In a solitude of the sea
Deep from human vanity,
And the Pride of Life that planned her, stilly couches she.

Steel chambers, late the pyres
Of her salamandrine fires,
Cold currents thrid, and turn to rhythmic tidal lyres.

Over the mirrors meant
To glass the opulent
The sea-worm crawls - grotesque, slimed, dumb, indifferent.

Jewels in joy designed
To ravish the sensuous mind
Lie lightless, all their sparkles bleared and black and blind.

Dim moon-eyed fishes near
Gaze at the gilded gear
And query: "What does this vaingloriousness down here?"...

Well: while was fashioning
This creature of cleaving wing,
The Immanent Will that stirs and urges everything

Prepared a sinister mate 

For her - so gaily great - 
A Shape of Ice, for the time far and dissociate,

And as the smart ship grew
In stature, grace, and hue,
In shadowy silent distance grew the Iceberg too.

Alien they seemed to be:
No mortal eye could see
The intimate welding of their later history,

Or sign that they were bent
By paths coincident
On being anon twin halves of one august event,

Till the Spinner of the Years
Said "Now!" And each one hears,
And consummation comes, and jars two hemispheres.

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