Use of Poetic Devices in Thomas Hardy’s Poem, The Convergence of the Twain
Using distinctive diction, detailed imagery, and references to God, Thomas Hardy portrays his perspective of the sinking of “Titanic” in his poem, “The Convergence of the Twain.” Employing these poetic mechanisms, Hardy claims that the sinking of the Titanic was fate and meant to happen. The title furthermore portrays the coming together of the hemispheres as Titanic and God.
Hardy uses strong meaningful diction to convey his thoughts of the sinking of the Titanic. Words such as “vaingloriousness”, “opulent”, and “jewels in joy” illustrate Titanic for the reader so that he/she can picture the greatness of the ship. Phrases such as “Lie lightless, all their sparkles bleared and black and blind” describe what the Titanic looked after the sinking, loosing all of its great features. Hardy’s use of strong, describing diction depicts his view of the ship, before and after.
In addition to the use of colorful diction, Hardy employs detailed imagery. The phrase “Dim moon-eyed fishes near Gaze at the guilded gear” depicts fishes looking at the sunk Titanic and wondering what “this vaingloriousness” was doing under the sea. He also mentions in the third stanza how the “jewels in joy designed To ravish the sensuous mind” were all lost and covered by darkness. Using these detailed images, Hardy is portraying the contrasts of before the ship sunk and after.
Using powerful diction and verbose imagery, Hardy furthermore instills his attitude of the sinking up employing references to God indirectly. When he states that “The Immanent Will that stirs and urges everything Prepared a sinister mate”, he is referring to God and how fate made the iceberg. He also refers to the power of God again when he says, “Till the Spinner of the Years Said, ‘Now!’.” In this phrase, he conveys that God said it was time for the people onboard the Titanic to go down under. Hardy’s references to God supported his own claim that fate claimed the Titanic.
“The Convergence of the Twain” is a nonlinear retelling of the Titanic disaster of 1912; however, on a deeper level, the poem explores hubris, downfall, and how fate connects hubris to downfall. Through tone, diction and juxtaposition, the speaker describes the sinking of the Titanic as inevitable and necessary.
I think from the attitude of the diver, he was suicidal. As he dove into the sea, he does so at a high speed and with reckless abandon, taking to account all the details of everything he sees as he plunged deeper into the sea. “swiftly descended/free falling, weightless”. He was doing all he could to forget about life as he descends “…. Lost images/fadingly remembered.” Initially in his descent into the ocean, the diver, having decided to end his life, treated the images in the sea as if they would be the last things he will see before his death, so I think he thought it best to savor his last moments while he had the time. When he got to the ship, he described all that was there. While I read the poem, I couldn’t help but conjure those images in my mind. The ship was very quiet and cold when he entered it but the silence drew him in and he was eager to go in, not minding the cold because at that moment he was suicidal and didn’t care about life. With the help of a flashlight, he saw chairs moving slowly and he labeled the movement as a “sad slow dance”. From this, I think the speaker is trying to point out that there are sad memories on the ship. There is no story of how the ship got to the bottom of the sea, but it seems the ship used to be a place of fun, celebration, and happiness. Now that it is wrecked and in the bottom of the sea, the
Some of the most intriguing stories of today are about people’s adventures at sea and the thrill and treachery of living through its perilous storms and disasters. Two very popular selections about the sea and its terrors are The Perfect Storm by Sebastian Junger and “The Wreck of the Hesperus” by Henry Longfellow. Comparison between the two works determines that “The Wreck of the Hesperus” tells a more powerful sea-disaster story for several different reasons. The poem is more descriptive and suspenseful than The Perfect Storm, and it also plays on a very powerful tool to captivate the reader’s emotion. These key aspects combine to give the reader something tangible that allows them to relate to the story being told and affects them strongly.
The story’s theme is related to the reader by the use of color imagery, cynicism, human brotherhood, and the terrible beauty and savagery of nature. The symbols used to impart this theme to the reader and range from the obvious to the subtle. The obvious symbols include the time from the sinking to arrival on shore as a voyage of self-discovery, the four survivors in the dinghy as a microcosm of society, the shark as nature’s random destroyer of life, the sky personified as mysterious and unfathomable and the sea as mundane and easily comprehended by humans. The more subtle symbols include the cigars as representative of the crew and survivors, the oiler as the required sacrifice to nature’s indifference, and the dying legionnaire as an example of how to face death for the correspondent.
Thomas Hardy’s poem “The Convergence of the Twain” highlights the relationship between mankind’s arrogance and the demise of the Titanic. Hardy opens with the lines “deep from human vanity/ and the Pride of Life that planned her, stilly couches she”. He does so with the intent to show readers that the mighty Titanic, touted by many as a ship that “not even God Himself could sink”, now lies deathly silent at the bottom of the ocean where human vanity no longer matters. Through this fatal connection, an ominous tone emerges in Hardy’s poem. This tone is heavily stressed when the speaker states that the ship’s impending destruction is destined to happen. As the Titanic is assembled, the Imminent Will, a force that governs the universe, “prepared a sinister mate”. This sinister mate is revealed to be the iceberg that will eventually lead to the ship’s downfall. From the ship’s very construction, it is already destined to collide with the iceberg, its ultimate fate. As the ship continued to grow in “stature, grace, and hue”, so too did the Iceberg.
The tragic history of the Titanic, the sinking of the “unsinkable” giant of a ship shocked the entire world and contributed to important shifts in the mass consciousness of the people who lived at that period and assessed the achievements of new technologies and their role. However, one would have been hardly able to predict in 1912 that this tragedy, no matter how significant and meaningful, would leave such a deep imprint on the history of human civilization. The continuing interest in the fate of the great vessel has taken the form of various narrations and given rise to numerous myths enveloping the true history and, in this way, often obscuring the facts related to the tragedy. In recent years, this interest has been emphasized by the dramatic discovery of the wreck and examination of its remains. The recovery of artifacts from the Titanic and the exploration of the site where it had sank stimulated new speculations on different issues of the failure to rescue the Titanic and the role of different factors contributing to the disaster. These issues have been traditionally in the focus of discussions that caused controversies and ambiguous interpretations of various facts. They also often overshadowed other parts of the disaster story that were confirmed by statistical data and revealed the impact of social realities. The social stratification of passengers that reflected the social realities of the period and its class interests determined the chances of survival, with most of those perished in the Titanic disaster having been lower class individuals.
This process is aimed at ensuring the project being pursued has a potential of delivering by adhering to the allocated time, sticking to the budget and very important, meeting customers specifications (Mott McDonald, 2002). It involves assessing the projects at critical stages (also referred to as gates) in its lifecycle and thus assuring it can advance to the next stage successfully. This function is performed by an independent experienced team, after which they assure the Senior Responsible Owners that the project can progress successfully (National Academies US & National Research US, 2004). There are six critical stages (gateways) in the lifecycle of a project that the independent gateway review team will evaluate and thus provide th...
The human voyage into life is basically feeble, vulnerable, uncontrollable. Since the crew on a dangerous sea without hope are depicted as "the babes of the sea", it can be inferred that we are likely to be ignorant strangers in the universe. In addition to the danger we face, we have to also overcome the new challenges of the waves in the daily life. These waves are "most wrongfully and barbarously abrupt and tall", requiring "a new leap, and a leap." Therefore, the incessant troubles arising from human conditions often bring about unpredictable crises as "shipwrecks are apropos of nothing." The tiny "open boat", which characters desperately cling to, signifies the weak, helpless, and vulnerable conditions of human life since it is deprived of other protection due to the shipwreck. The "open boat" also accentuates the "open suggestion of hopelessness" amid the wild waves of life. The crew of the boat perceive their precarious fate as "preposterous" and "absurd" so much so that they can feel the "tragic" aspect and "coldness of the water." At this point, the question of why they are forced to be "dragged away" and to "nibble the sacred cheese of life" raises a meaningful issue over life itself. This pessimistic view of life reflects the helpless human condition as well as the limitation of human life.
Write a comparison of The Handsomest Drowned Man in the World and The Drowned Giant, commenting in detail on the ways in which the authors' use language to convey their respective themes. "The Handsomest Drowned Man in the World" by Gabriel Garcia Marquez and "The Drowned Giant" by J.G. Ballard are both short stories written with similar plots but explore extremely different themes. In this essay I am going to compare the theme, plot, setting, language choices and stylistic effects between the two short stories and how all these relate back to theme itself. The themes of the stories are totally different. They are both about how societies react to the external world and exotic things, but the meanings are exactly opposite.
Even Diving into the Wreck plays a more general note of individuality than of feminism; in the words of Judith Lewin, ‘In Rich’s 1972 poem “Diving into the Wreck,” the lyrical voice is that of a diver, who, as her body descends in the water, resists the distraction of undersea life in order to pursue her goal, both the exploration of a sunken ship and the exploration of self’(54).
Priestly presents Mr Arthur Birling and a ignorant and foolish character with us use of Dramatic Irony. As Mr Birling was delivering his speech at his daughter, Sheila's engagement, he mentioned that the titanic, was ''unsinkable, absolutely unsinkable''. As the play was written in 1945, we know that this bold statement is far from correct.
“...the TItanic hit the iceberg at 11:40 pm and sank at 2:20 am” (Lord 173). April 12, 1912 marked the night the RMS Titanic vanished into the vast Atlantic Ocean. The Titanic only had enough lifeboats for ⅓ of the 2208 people on board. This survival rate is so meager because the appearance of the Titanic was more salient than its passengers’ safety. Captain Edward Smith figured all the necessary amount of lifeboats would look “cluttered” on deck. The Titanic also had the prominent title of “unsinkable ship” because of that, the captain thought lifeboats wouldn’t be needed but indeed they were. The impact of the lifeboat shortage on the Titanic forced the captain to call the BirkenHead drill, caused men to dress as women, and brought passengers to participate in bribery.
In Thomas Hardy's poem, “The Convergence of the Twain, or the come together of the two, demonstrated his attitude toward the sunken ship,Titanic. Today, everyone at least know that Titanic was a real life love-tragedy that once happened. Although the movie Titanic was filmed in the perspective of the love couple. On the opposite, Hardy’s poem is not, but rather in a perspective of an observer with a tone of mocking when describing the sunken ship and sinking of the ship through the use of poetic devices, including alliteration, imagery, and enjambment.
Have you ever considered that several of the noises you hear are noise pollution? The thought of pollution, to the majority of people, brings reflections of chemical spills, radiation, and holes in the ozone layer, and noise is usually last on the list. "The term "noise pollution" is the term used to describe environmental pollution that deals with annoying or harmful noises and is constantly happening"(1). Some common examples of noise pollution, that many people take for granite, are lawn mowers, airplanes, and car alarms. Noise pollution should be taken seriously because it can cause permanent hearing loss.
Noise does not discriminate, it has no face, no limits, no size however it has an identity which is described as a loud, surprising, irritating, static, or unwanted sound just to name a few. Noise affects people in several ways, from nature cause noise to artificial noise. It will be here and it has a substantial effect on our lives. Noise exists in every area, where some sorts of energy of any kind occur. Any form of noise can be very damaging to our hearing. Both the level of noise and the length of time you constantly hear to the noise can put you at risk for hearing loss and stress.