JOSEPH BRODSKY
367
century possible. Against all odds, against the absence of "cause."
And the century - which is soon to be over - has gallantly paid this
poem back, as we see in this classroom. In any case, as prophecies go,
"The Darkling Thrush" has proved to be more sober and accurate than,
let's say, "The Second Coming," by W. B. Yeats. A thrush proved a
more reliable source than a falcon; perhaps because this thrush showed up
for Mr. Hardy some twenty years earlier. Perhaps because monotony is
more in tune with time's own idiom than a shriek.
So if "The Darkling Thrush" is a poem about nature, it is so only
by half, since both bard and bird are that nature's effects, and only one
of them is, to put it coarsely, hopeful. It is, rather, a poem about two
perceptions of the same reality, and as such it is clearly a philosophical
lyric. There is no hierarchy here between hope and hopelessness, dis–
tributed in the poem with notable evenhandedness - certainly not be–
tween their carriers, as our thrush, I am tempted to point out, is not
"aged" for nothing. It's been around, and its "blessed Hope" is as valid
as the absence thereof. The last line's caesura isolating "unaware" is elo–
quent enough to muille out regret and bring to the last word an air of
assertion. After all, the "blessed Hope" is that for the future; that's why
the last word here is spoken by reason.
V
Twelve years later - but still before the Irish bard's beast set out for
Bethlehem - the British passenger liner
Titanic
sank on her maiden voy–
age in the mid-Atlantic after colliding with an iceberg. Over fifteen hun–
dred lives were lost. That was presumably the first of many disasters the
century ushered in by Thomas Hardy's thrush became famous for.
"The Convergence of the Twain" was written barely two weeks
after the catastrophe; it was published shortly afterward, on May 14th.
The
Titanic
was lost on April 14th. In other words, the raging contro–
versy over the cause of the disaster, the court case against the company,
the shocking survivors' accounts, etc. - all those things were still ahead
at the time of this poem's composition. The poem thus amounts to a
visceral response on the part of our poet; what's more, the first time it
was printed, it was accompanied by a headnote saying "Improvised on
the Loss of the
Titanic."
So, what chord did this disaster strike in Mr. Hardy? "The Conver–
gence of the Twain" is habitually billed by the critical profession either
as the poet's condemnation of modern man's self-delusion of technolog–
ical omnipotence or as the song of his vainglory's and excessive luxury's
comeuppance. To be sure, the poem is both. The
Titanic
itself was a
