Introduction
The facts of the case are as follows: the RMS Titanic, owned by the White Star Line was the largest passenger ship of its day, a luxury liner regarded by some as unsinkable. It sank on the 14th of April, 1912, on its maiden voyage. The ship struck an iceberg which opened a gash in the hull 299 feet in length, flooding five watertight compartments when four was the maximum the ship could bear. Of the 2,223 people on board only 763 survived.
This story has been told in many different ways, the most recent one being the film Titanic in which the sinking is incidental to a romance in which a first-class passenger falls in love with a young man traveling in steerage. There have been books written about the lives lost, the construction of the ship, its sinking and its recovery, and the Internet contains many sites dedicated to telling the same story from different perspectives and in different genres. As will be shown, by telling the same story in a different genre, presents a different truth about that event.
Analysis
The first account is provided by poet and novelist Thomas Hardy (1848-1928) who was inspired by the tragedy to write “Convergence of the Twain,” subtitled “Lines on the loss of the Titanic.” In the opening he takes aim at the claim that the ship was unsinkable, calling that an example of “human vanity” and the “Pride of life” from which the ship now lies far removed. The fires which drove the ship across the waters have now been extinguished and the mirrors that briefly reflected the social elite now show only the sea-worm, “grotesque, slimed, dumb, indifferent” (Hardy). Jewels that once graced the persons of the wealthy are now indistinguishable from rocks on the sea bottom and fish gaze at the “vaingloriousness” that is now just debris.
The poet asks whether humanity’s greatest achievement angered the gods, and is this why they destroyed the Titanic? There was no anger involved, says Hardy, only the “Immanent Will,” the irresistible force that drives all life and history. The Will “prepared a sinister mate” for the Titanic while it was being built, “a Shape of Ice, for the time fat and dissociate” but growing more distinct and threatening as the ship grew.
No one who saw the iceberg and the ship could see “the intimate welding of their later history,” he says, or that they would soon be “twin halves of one August event,” but as their destinies converge their “consummation” takes places and shakes the world. The Immanent Will impelled the construction of these two giants but it was the “Spinner of the Years” that brought them together, two forces indifferent to humanity or nature and forever beyond our control.
Poetry, as a genre, employs diction, meter and what might be called a philosophic attitude, an investigation of the ultimate meaning of things – or, in this case, whether the event has any meaning at all. To engage the reader in this question, Hardy uses language that is archaic, exact and connotative, as when describing the ship’s great furnaces which once made steam to propel her, as “steel chambers, late the pyres / Of her salamandrine fires,” thereby suggesting the coldness and blackness of the furnaces which were once hot with “pyres” of fire so intense they seemed to take on a life of their own. In that way he emphasizes how quickly one element overcomes another, how unpredictable life is and that man proposes but God disposes – even if God, in Hardy’s poem, is merely a blind force.
The other genre may be called oral history. Every survivor was, at one time or another, asked to tell his or her story, but the one analyzed here is a particularly elegant one that at times crosses the boundaries of the oral history genre into a more poetic one. In this case, the oral history is presented in the context or another genre, reportage, on a website that tries to recreate history in such a way as to turn the reader into an eyewitness. However, as the reportage makes claims that have been refuted in many other versions, it will not be referred to.
The oral history is proved by Elizabeth Shutes, a forty-year old governess to nineteen-year old Margaret Graham who traveled first class with her parents. She calls her story “End of a Splendid Journey.” When Shutes feels “a queer quivering,” go through the ship she jumps up but immediately sits back down because she has been told that she and her charge are on the most technologically advanced ship in the world. Yet she is now on the alert.
She describes the feeling on board ship as “sepulchrally still,” using a poetic device that at once gives the reader a clear idea of how it felt to be in her cabin, and foreshadows the disaster to come. Isolated voices are heard through the stillness, one informing her that an iceberg was spotted quite close to the ship. After building up the suspense by describing how the girl’s hand shook as she attempted to eat a chicken sandwich, she asks an officer if there is anything wrong.
He reassures her but by now she takes nothing for granted. “I listened intently,” she writes, “and distinctly heard, ‘We can keep the water out for a while.’ Then, and not until then, did I realize the horror of an accident at sea” (Shutes). They dress quickly and are escorted to a meeting place by a Mr. Roebling, identified in her story as an American gentleman although she fails to mention he was also the grandson of the man who designed and built the Brooklyn Bridge.
Shutes describes the scene on board as she and her companions hurry to the main deck. The staircases are lined with stewards whom she describes as quiet and brave, all wearing “white, ghostly life-preservers.” Again Shutes uses the poet’s device of adjectives that foreshadows tragedy, and strengthen that sense with her mention of “pale faces” of the people “strapped about with those white bars.” Unlike the poet, however, she feels she has to explain that the scene was “gruesome” even though she had already created that effect.
They were led to the lifeboats but the “women and children first” policy on board the liner and the shortage of lifeboats, ensured that the men would not survive. Everyone knww it, she implies, but all maintained a quiet, brave front. This is where the genre requires the oral historian to pay tribute to the bravery of those who did not survive. The poet would not avoid the drama but the oral historian must honor the dead; anything would be regarded as bad taste.
However, the oral historian has the advantage of having been present at a “convergence of the twain.” Hardy could not have described the sensation of being in a lifeboat with thirty-five other passengers being lowered into the blackness with “rough seamen” shouting out contradictory orders, and with the boat seemingly about to “capsize in mid-air” (Shutes). When at last they reach the oily waters, she finds herself in a “tiny boat on a great sea” in the blackness of night, reluctant to part from the safety of the great ship.
She still cannot believe that the Titanic will go under, and yet she sees “the outline of that great, good ship was growing less. In the bow lights are being extinguished by the water. There is nothing in the lifeboat to eat or drink. A mother and daughter call out to other boats to see if their husband and father is on board without getting an affirmative answer. In spite of their sorrow the women huddle with the others to keep warm throughout the long, freezing night. At last, using a straw hat as a beacon, they draw the attention of a rescue ship.
Conclusion
The poetic genre, at least according to this sample, takes a more metaphysical approach to events while the oral historian focuses on the fate of the individual. Both are highly effective in getting the reader involved in the passengers’ dilemma, the one defining the truth they may have experienced on the philosophical plane, the other giving a truthful account of what actually happened during that unlucky convergence; and both are equally successful in making the reader empathize with its victims.
Works Cited
Hardy, Thomas. “Convergence of the Twain.” The Complete Poems of Thomas Hardy. Ed. James Gibson. London: Palgrave MacMillan, 2002.
Shutes, Elizabeth. “The Sinking of the Titanic, 1912,” EyeWitness to History. (2000). Web.