Hardy's the Convergence of the Twain

Incontrovertibly, 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); "in-
timate 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 earth-
shaking," it also adumbrates a scene in which two globular "hemi-
spheres" 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 puden-
da 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[-]dif-
ferent" 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 "consum-

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