460
PARTISAN REVIEW
from the point of view of this poet, they are; and one can't help thinking that
the gravity "indifferent" is burdened with in this context is perhaps self-referen–
tial.
Jewels in joy designed
To ravish the sensuous mind
Lie lightless, all their sparkles bleared and black and blind.
Perhaps this is as good a time as any to point to the cinematic, frame-by-frame
procedure our poet resorts to here, and the fact that he is doing this in 1912,
long before film became a daily - well, nightly - reality. I believe I've said
someplace that it was poetry that invented the technique of montage, not Eisen–
stein. A vertical arrangement of identical stanzas on the page is a film. A couple
of years ago a salvaging company trying to raise the
Titanic
showed its footage
of the ship on TV; it was remarkably close to the matter at hand. Their emphasis
was obviously on the contents of the ship's vau lt, which among other things
might have contained a manuscript ofJoseph Conrad's most recent novel, which
was sent by the author to his American publisher with the ship, since it was to be
the speediest mail carrier, among other virtues. The camera circled in the vault
area incessantly, attracted by the smell of its riches, but to no avail. Thomas
Hardy does a far better job.
"Jewels in joy designed" practically glitters with its
j's
and
5'S.
SO again
does, with its swishing and hissing
5'S,
the next line. Yet the most fascinating use
of alliteration is on display in the third line, where the ravished, sensuous mind
goes flat, as all the line's /'s crackle and burst in "sparkles," turning the jewels in
"bleared and black and blind" into so many released bubbles rising to the line's
end. The alliteration is literally undoing itself in front of our eyes.
It is more rewarding to admire the poet's ingenuity here than to read into
this line a sermon on the ephemeral and destructive nature of riches. Even if the
latter were his concern, the emphasis would be on the paradox itself rather than
the social commentary. Had Thomas Hardy been fifty years younger at the time
of the composition of "The Convergence of the Twain," he perhaps might have
sharpened the social edge of the poem a bit more, though even this is doubtful.
As it was, he was seventy-two years old, fairly well off himself; and among the
fifteen hundred souls lost when the
Titanic
went down, two were his personal
acquaintances. However, on his underwater journey, he is not looking for them
either.
Dim moon-eyed fishes near
Gaze at the gilded gear
And query: "What does this vaingloriousness down here?"
"Gaze at the gilded gear" has obviously crept into the second line of this stanza
by pure alliterative inertia (the author presumably had other word combinations
