The following version of this poem was used to create this guide: Hardy, Thomas. "The Convergence of the Twain." 1912. Poetry Foundation. https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/47266/the-convergence-of-the-twain.

Note that all parenthetical citations within the guide refer to the lines of the poem from which the quotations are taken.

Twenty minutes before midnight on April 14, 1912, RMS Titanic – a British liner transporting hundreds of passenger – collided with an undetected iceberg in the middle of the Atlantic. Within a matter of hours, the ship broke veritably in two and sank beneath sea level. The tragedy loomed large in contemporary minds, not only because of the massive, wasteful loss of life, but also because of the impending disaster it spelled out for excessive luxury. In the years and decades following that dreadful night, the Titanic wreck has populated dozens of cultural products, from books to films and, necessarily, poems. Thomas Hardy was already a writer of accomplishment and notoriety when he published "The Convergence of the Twain," but the piece produced a mixed, controversial response nonetheless. Its occasionally didactic, prophesying tone even encouraged some readers to reproach the author for a supposed lack of feeling.

Hardy's allegorical interpretation of the Titanic disaster is intimately connected to the waves of comparative wealth and leisure that consumed North America and Britain in the early twentieth century. Since the late 1800s, American and British societies had been operating on largely decadent lines; lucrative new industries had sprouted up, artistic and cultural movements were gaining traction, and a sense of fin-de-siecle carelessness filled the transatlantic air. Hardy, however, was not much taken with this lush and profligate culture – indeed, he casts the clash between Titanic and iceberg as a cautionary tale for American/European excesses. The Titanic, to his mind, presented a ready symbol for human vanity and flippancy in the face of genuine life concerns.