Convergence of the Twain
Hardy, Horace, and the Jar of Influence
When the Titanic sank on April 15, 1912, the event had all the air of a Greek tragedy. Ever since Homer, ate (ruin) has followed hybris (arrogance), and what better example of hybris than to build the largest ship on earth, and deem it “practically unsinkable”? The Titanic was the Persian Empire in boat-form. Even its name doomed it: The Titans were monsters of hybris, destroyed by Zeus in their rebellion against order and civilization.
All this was lost on no one. Whole fleets of poems were churned out, so many that the New York Times remarked, “To write about the Titanic a poem worth printing requires that the author should have something more than paper, pencil, and a strong feeling that the disaster was a terrible one.” These effusions were equal parts moralizing and anthropomorphic, hectoring and sentimental; they decried industrial arrogance, brandished fists against the mocking elements, and sang the brave dead to heaven. George Bernard Shaw called the response “an explosion of outrageous Romantic lying.”
Thomas Hardy participated in this explosion, but with the difference that his poem “The Converge of the Twain” — strange, unsentimental, and utterly indifferent to the dead — is still read and admired today. He wrote it to order, for a Matinée in Aid of the Titanic Disaster Fund, and with amazing speed, finishing on April 24, a mere nine days after the tragedy. It’s a cruel poem, one that couldn’t have been much appreciated by survivors or the victims’ families, but also a great one, possessed of that combination of immediacy and distance which is the hallmark of enduring art.
Much has been and will continue to be written about the poem’s divergence from the rout of popular sentiment, its dark felicities of diction, its uncanny philosophical wavering between Fate and Randomness, and the psycho-sexual energy which seems an emanation of Hardy’s own unhappy marriage. My interest here, however, is in an aspect of the poem that has, so far as I know, gone unremarked: its reliance on Horace, and how that reliance helped Hardy produce an occasional poem that has long outlasted its occasion.
Given the public nature of the tragedy and the classical moral on offer, it’s no surprise that Hardy should have thought of Horace, the public poet par excellence. Though never a great Latinist — Hardy was no Professor Housman — he studied the Classics laboriously in his youth, and might have pursued a professorship, had he been encouraged in Greek by his mentor, Horace Moule. When his father died in 1892, Hardy seems to have gone back to Horace, for in his much-annotated 1855 edition there is written, beside the beginning of Ode 1.22 (Integer vitae), “T.H. (sen.)” for Thomas Hardy Senior. Hardy knew Horace well enough to return to him in moments of deep feeling and intense meaning.
The poem he turned to now was Ode 2.10, on the Golden Mean, also known as Rectius vives from its Latin incipit. The thematic relevance should be clear. Horace’s poem addresses one Licinius, probably Licinius Murena, Maecenas’ brother-in-law, whose excessive candor in opposition to Augustus eventually led to his death. Horace speaks to Licinius as a friendly adviser, urging caution. Here’s my translation:
You’ll live a better life, Licinius,
not always braving the open ocean or,
too scared of storms, always hugging close
to the rough shore.Whoever loves and respects the Golden Mean
lives safe — his roof will never let the rains in —
lives modest, unbegrudged for his obscene
and gaudy mansion.Often the tallest pines writhe in the wind’s teeth;
the loftiest towers fall with the loudest crash;
the tops of mountains are blasted most beneath
the lightning’s flash.The man with a heart prepared by philosophy
in bad times hopes for, and in good times fears,
a change of fortune. Jupiter blots the sky;
the same god clearsthe clouds away. If life’s hard now, it’s not
forever: sometimes Apollo stirs the silent
Muse with music; his bow’s not always taut
or his mind violent.In tight times, spread your canvas; be full of bluff
and bluster. But if you’re wise, in good luck’s gales
you’ll reef it in, so too much wind won’t puff
your swollen sails.
Horace’s poem complements Hardy’s in three respects. First, though the ode flits from metaphor to metaphor, it begins and ends with sailing and the dangers of shipwreck. Second, it aims its rhetoric squarely at just the sort of hybris that sank the Titanic: “The loftiest towers fall with the loudest crash.” Finally, the ode’s extensive use of antithesis, linguistic and thematic, corresponds precisely to Hardy’s own antithetical “twain” of female ship and male iceberg.
Hardy’s poem takes both formal and linguistic cues from Horace. In Latin, Rectius vives is in Sapphic stanzas, which consist of three eleven-syllable lines (that scan - x - - u u - u - ) followed by an ‘adonic colon’ (- u u - x). While Horace treats the stanza as a quatrain, there is some question whether Sappho may have heard it as a tercet, since her third lines sometimes break in the middle of a word. Whether the Sapphic is a quatrain with a short fourth line, or a tercet with a long third line, there’s a certain tension in Horace’s ode between the theme of balance and the unequal stanza, reflected perhaps in the way the dehortation against hybris seems at times (e.g., S3 and 6) to overbalance the idea of moderation. Still, it would be unwise to push this too far, since Horace wrote many poems in Sapphics, on widely varying themes.
The form Hardy invents for “Convergence” also plays with ideas of balance:
I
In a solitude of the sea
Deep from human vanity,
And the Pride of Life that planned her, stilly couches she.II
Steel chambers, late the pyres
Of her salamandrine fires,
Cold currents thrid, and turn to rhythmic tidal lyres.
On the surface, we find a tercet rhyming AAA and consisting of two trimeters and a hexameter. But underneath, there is a Rubaiyat-style (AAxA) trimeter quatrain which Hardy has chosen to disguise — really, to unbalance — by running the last two lines together. The stanza looks remarkably like a boat, lying long and low in the water, with the Roman numerals sitting on top like smokestacks. Hardy’s stanza is both balanced and imbalanced: Hearing the trimeter quatrain underneath the irregular tercets, we hear the hidden, secret, and essentially equal rapprochement of ship and iceberg.
The interplay of twos and threes has thematic resonance. The poem is about a “twain,” namely, ship and iceberg, but there is a third figure responsible for the macabre marriage, which Hardy characteristically refuses to call God — the “Immanent Will that stirs and urges everything.” At times, the tercet (one might say Trinity) feels like a “twain,” of couplet (ship) and hexameter (iceberg); at others, ship and iceberg each seem one line of the couplet, while the menacing hexameter belongs to that Third Thing that joins and cleaves.
In the first stanza above, for example, the two-ness is felt most strongly: the opening couplet with its immediate rhyme suggests human industry and enterprise (with “human vanity” as the pessimistic outcome), while the third line conjures, from the image of Titanic in her eternal couch, the iceberg looming in ambuscade. Or, if we hear the tercet as a quatrain, it’s a chiastic one, in which “human vanity” and “Pride of Life” are surrounded by the “solitude of the sea” and the “stilly couch,” as the ship is surrounded by the ocean. Either way, the stanza is in balance. The second, by contrast, is shot through with threes: Steel, fire, and water, the latter of which is said to “thrid,” that is, divide into three parts, and produce “rhythmic tidal lyres,” whose unheard music makes a vanitas vanitatum counterpart to the Romantic Aeolian harp. The “cold currents” here form a physical analogue to the “Immanent Will,” since the water both connects and divides the other two, while itself remaining immanent within the triad. (The fourth element, air, is pointedly absent.)
But let us consider Hardy’s Immanent Will, since it’s there that Horace’s influence shows most strongly. Both poems divide into halves. The first half of Rectius vives charts extremes which shift from stanza to stanza — recklessness and cowardice, wealth and poverty, ambition (without a balancing opposite) — while the second settles on a constant that underlies the first: The vicissitudes of fortune, to which all alike are subject. Hardy’s poem differs in that its odd number of stanzas gives it a middle stanza on which to turn. The first five focus on the Titanic in its watery grave; the middle sixth presents the Immanent Will, the orchestrator of the deadly marriage; then the final five imagine the Iceberg and the marriage’s ultimate “consummation.” The poem as initially printed had only ten stanzas; the fifth (ending “What does this vaingloriousness down here?”) was inserted later. My guess is that Hardy added the stanza in part so that the sixth would be right at the poem’s heart:
VI
Well: while was fashioning
This creature of cleaving wing,
The Immanent Will that stirs and urges everythingVII
Prepared a sinister mate
For her — so gaily great —
A Shape of Ice, for the time far and dissociate.
These lines appear directly inspired by the Latin of Rectius vives, stanzas four to five:
Sperat infestis, metuit secundis
alteram sortem bene praeparatum
pectus. Informis hiemes reducit
Iuppiter idemsummovet.
The well-prepared heart in bad times
hopes for, and in good times fears,
the opposite condition. Leads forth unsightly storms
the same Jupiterremoves them.
The ungainliness of the prose crib belies the felicity of the Latin. The rhetorical balance is wonderful. The first line is a perfect chiasmus — sperat (hopes for) balances metuit (fears), while infestis (in hostile circumstances) balances secundis (in favorable ones). These two verbs share one object — alteram sortem, “the other/opposite fate.” Then comes the remarkable interstanzaic enjambment, the only one in Horace’s poem, as it is in Hardy’s. Iuppiter idem (“the same Jupiter”) stands as subject of both reducit above and summovet below. The physical arrangement of words intricately embodies Horace’s theme of balance and moderation, just as Hardy’s stanza form embodies his.
Hardy’s stanzas are equally dense, but less elegant, mainly because he is forcing English syntax into Latinate contortions. His “Immanent Will” comes at the exact center of the poem and echoes Horace’s Iuppiter idem; as in Horace, it provides the subject for one verb above (“was fashioning”) and one below (“Prepared”). The mirror-effect is striking; on a visual level, the last line resembles the surface of the ocean, above which sits the Titanic, “this creature of cleaving wing,” while below the enjambment lurks the iceberg, her “sinister mate.” Both descriptions contain puns: the wings “cleave” to the ship — Hardy is thinking of Genesis: “Therefore shall a man leave his father and mother, and shall cleave unto his wife: they twain shall be one flesh” — but they are also cloven by the Iceberg, which is “sinister” — the “left-hand” of a single married body whose right hand is the ship. The right only learns in retrospect what the left hand has been doing; but the two have long been betrothed, as “twin halves of one august event” (“august” invoking the preordination of augury), for now still “dissociate,” uncompanioned (< Latin socius, companion, ally).
Even the “twain” of the title participates in this duality. Meredith Bergmann has pointed out that the word “was often used by Hardy for lovers that are both a pair and separated;” one thinks of the stock expression “cleft in twain.” Hardy’s puns, then, in which words contain their opposites, take Horace’s technique of juxtaposition and balance one step further: Opposites, held apart in Horace, meet immanently in Hardy in an “intimate welding” only one letter away from a “wedding.”
Hardy’s Immanent Will is at once less personal and more menacing than Horace’s Jupiter. It both is everything and is contained within everything. It “stirs” everything — that is, mixes it together, ‘mixing’ being a time-honored euphemism for sexual intercourse (sc. Latin miscere) — and “urges,” from Latin urgere, “oppress,” as in Paradise Lost (1.67–9): “but torture without end / Still urges, and a fiery Deluge, fed / With ever-burning Sulphur unconsumed.” In fact, it resembles the Empedoclean “quintessence,” the “fifth element” that causes the other four (earth, air, fire, and water) to join together and break apart in love and war, which it marries, as Aphrodite and Ares are lovers in myth. Hardy’s Will simultaneously brings together and breaks asunder, in puns like “cleaving” and “dissociate,” and in the enjambment between stanzas six and seven, which breaks one sentence in half while dovetailing the two together.
The greatness of Hardy’s poem in no way depends upon our recognition of the debt it owes to Horace. Yet once we’ve noticed it, the allusion takes on a meaning of its own, as if the two poems were “sinister mates,” prepared by Hardy’s own will, immanently pulling the strings of his poem just as his mechanistic (or Empedoclean) non-deity does in the universe. Of course, it’s impossible to know when Hardy thought of Horace as he was writing “Convergence,” but it’s fun to speculate. On the one hand, I like to think the inspiration came as suddenly and jarringly as the iceberg itself:
IX
Alien they seemed to be:
No mortal eye could see
The intimate welding of their later history,X
Or sign that they were bent
By paths coincident
On being anon twin halves of one august event,XI
Till the Spinner of the Years
Said ‘Now!’ And each one hears,
And consummation comes, and jars two hemispheres.
It’s not surprising, given the ambivalence of his relationships with women, that Hardy should describe such a calamitous event in sexual terms. But in the sexual language we might also feel a sort of orgasmic shock of inspiration, as two minds, embodied in two poems, meet across the chasm of the ages.
My understanding of influence, however, inclines me in a different direction. I suspect that it may have been from meditating on the Titanic disaster alongside Horace’s poem that “Convergence” was conceived. Kenneth Rexroth has observed that “translation saves you from your contemporaries.” Rexroth means that engaging with an alien tradition (such as the Classics) can help us to remember the future, that what is foreign and far-off is fertile ground for imagination. Hardy’s poem is a sort of loose translation: he may well have set out to write a Horatian ode on a Horace-sized event, though in the end the mysterious processes of art joined Hardy to his own dark agnosticism and frustrated sexuality to produce a poem as deep and strange — not to mention cruel and inhuman — as the ocean where the Titanic still sleeps. The disaster was immediate for everyone; it was the distance that Hardy found, partly in his own temperament, partly in Horace, that produced a poem that still fascinates us long after the whole rest of the fleet of contemporary effusions has been swamped and forgotten.
Christopher Childers has poems, essays, and translations published or forthcoming at Agni, Parnassus, Arion, and elsewhere. He has been a finalist for the Ruth Lilly Fellowship and is currently at work on a translation of Greek and Latin lyric poetry from Archilochus to Martial, under contract with Penguin Classics.
