Do you know “The Convergence of the Twain?” If you don’t, read it (below). If you do, read it again. Even if you’ve memorized it, again. For my money among our mightiest poems in English, soaring, craggy, and forbidding as Mount Everest, grim, stark, jut-jawed, ferocious, no attempt to ingratiate. Prophets do not flirt, they say what they see, however grim.

Thomas Hardy was my age when he wrote it. He couldn’t have been younger. Inevitability takes a lifetime to fathom. Young, we imagine we decide how to be. In our middle years, we’re persuaded we have choices. Near our close, looking back before our sight dims, we see our supposed elections were acceptance: whatever happened had to, it couldn’t have been otherwise.

In the Titanic’s sinking, Hardy foresaw his own. And he composed a poem which, like Bach’s Art of Fugue or Beethoven’s Diabelli Variations, is a late-in-life masterclass in his art, skillful beyond ostentation, to display not his own genius but the capabilities of his genre. It’s a poem I’ve carried in my heart for more than fifty years. I find myself repeating its phrases “for no reason” – which is the most emphatic reason.

I scribble notes from the masterclass.

The poem is inhospitable. Each of its eleven little stanzas is preceded by a Roman numeral like an armed guard. (Roman numerals in such close order mean no kidding around.) The poem’s meter is weird: two three-pulse lines (trimeters) followed by one six-pulse (an hexameter): not easy to speak. That hexameter almost lurches, like a cripple hauling his game leg or a mountain climber heaving himself to the next ledge. No jollity here, no dancing.

And the lexicon! Who uses such words – “stilly,” “couches,” “salamandrine,” “thrid,” “vaingloriousness,” “cleaving,” “Immanent”? My Spellcheck spits them out as unacceptable. This is a hoary prophet’s voice rasping from a deep cave.

The first five stanzas – with their grim Roman sentries – describe the wreck of the Titanic as if seen from a submersible (which hadn’t been invented yet). It’s quiet and still in the depths. A sea-worm oozes across a cracked mirror – “grotesque, slimed, dumb, indifferent.” (That line particularly makes me long for a hot shower.) Spilled jewels mock the vanity of their extinguished owners. Fishes – an awkward plural and unforgettably “moon-eyed” – wonder about such gaudiness in the cold, hushed, slimy depths.

“Well,” harrumphs the poet. Sternly, almost angrily, he explains.

While the ship was being constructed in some dockyard, Fate – “which stirs and urges everything” – was constructing an Iceberg in its icy workshop to mate with the buoyant boat. Speaking of bad marriages! Fate insists they consummate – “Now!” – each obeys – and the whole world – two hemispheres equal one world – shudders.

Abstract forces, not people, are the actors in this drama: the “Pride of Life,” “the opulent,” “vaingloriousness,” “the Immanent Will,” “A Shape of Ice,” “the Spinner of the Years”. We see no skeletons in this shipwreck, no persons with names, only pathetic playthings, our ravishing baubles, left behind. Humans only imagine we’re in charge.

The poem offers no salvation from this inevitability, no rescue by Resurrection, dangles no hope except one: the poem itself. Listen: the horror turns music!

Text within this block will maintain its original spacing when publishedSteel chambers, late the pyresOf her salamandrine fires,Cold currents thrid, and turn to rhythmic tidal lyres.

Salamanders, in legend, were supposed inflammable, because they darted from logs tossed onto fires. A “salamandrine fire” is one which burns but does not consume.

We all sink to the depths – with our “human vanity,” “pride of life,” “sensuous minds” – but beauty persists. Life after death is not a pipedream. Thomas Hardy lives.

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Text within this block will maintain its original spacing when published The Convergence of the Twain(Lines on the loss of the "Titanic")

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.

III Over the mirrors meant To glass the opulentThe sea-worm crawls — grotesque, slimed, dumb, indifferent.

IV Jewels in joy designed To ravish the sensuous mindLie lightless, all their sparkles bleared and black and blind.

V Dim moon-eyed fishes near Gaze at the gilded gearAnd query: "What does this vaingloriousness down here?" ...

VI Well: while was fashioning This creature of cleaving wing,The Immanent Will that stirs and urges everything

VII Prepared a sinister mate For her — so gaily great —A Shape of Ice, for the time far and dissociate.

VIII And as the smart ship grew In stature, grace, and hue,In shadowy silent distance grew the Iceberg too.

IX Alien they seemed to be; No mortal eye could seeThe intimate welding of their later history,

X Or sign that they were bent By paths coincidentOn 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.