The Convergence Of The Twain Analysis

Thomas Hardy’s “The Convergence of the Twain” is a cautionary tale against Man’s attempt to transgress his myopia. Mirroring the Greek traditions of architecture and tragedy, Hardy impassively elevates the catastrophic accident to an cosmic ‘intelligent design’ - an orchestrated ‘convergence of the twain.’ Hardy presents this tragedy of human “vanity” through a detached, almost reportorial tone, developed from an omniscient point of view. Particularly, he uses sophisticated diction and wordplay as to elevate this event from any accident to a cleanly executed arrangement. Moreover, he demonstrates this through the fearfully elegant structure reminiscent of classic Greek architecture; the rhyme scheme follows an AAA consecutive rhyme, echoing …show more content…
From the get-go, Hardy relates the tale to the genre of tragedy, using the phrase “human vanity” and the personification of nature to emphasize a common hamartia in Greek tragedies: the materialism and hubris of mankind. He also distances himself from the poem using archaic diction in the descriptions of the ship, contributing to the poem’s absence of compassion towards the loss of life and raising the gravitas of the poem. In addition, Hardy displays the peripeteia in this tale, employing the sharp contrasts between opulence and decay; with the wordplay around the word “deep” and the listing of primitive sea fauna’s characteristics, the ship is characterized as the ironic pinnacle of Man’s greatest achievements of that time, and its “vaingloriousness” fails to blend with the aquatic setting, extinguishing its “salamandrine fires.” He also develops a theological outlook on history as if a Greek dramatist, using Biblical references, a reference to Clotho, and the suggestions of supernatural forces as to blur the identity of the “Immanent Will” towards an elusive and divine