370
PARTISAN REVIEW
sphere, straight into the heart of this utterly isolated element. In fact, the
second line is an invitation for the underwater journey which is what the
first half of the poem - a lengthy exposition again! - amounts to. To–
ward the end of the third line, the reader is wel1 along on a veritable
scuba-diving expedition.
Trimeters are a tricky proposition. They may be rewarding euphoni–
cal1y, but they natural1y constrain the content. At the outset of the
poem they help our poet to establish his tonality; but he is anxious to
get on with the business of the poem. For this, he gets the third, quite
capacious hexametric line, in which he proceeds indeed in a very busi–
nesslike, bloody-minded fashion:
And the Pride of Life that planned her, stilly couches she.
The first half of this line is remarkable for its pile-up of stresses, no less
than for what it ushers in: the rhetorical, abstract construct which is, on
top of that, also capitalized. Now, "the Pride of Life" is of course linked
syntactical1y to "human vanity," but this helps matters little because
(a}"human vanity" is not capitalized, and (b)it is still more coherent and
familiar a concept than the Pride of Life. Furthermore, the two
n's
in
"that planned her" give you a sense of a truly jammed, bottle neck-type
diction, befitting an editorial more than a poem.
No poet in his right mind would try to cram all this into half a line:
it is barely utterable. On the other hand, as we've noted, there were no
mikes. Actually, "And the Pride of Life that planned her," though men–
aced by its mechanical scansion, can be delivered out loud, to the effect
of somewhat unwarranted emphasis; the effort, however, will be
obvious. The question is, why does Thomas Hardy do this? And the
answer is, because he is confident that the image of the ship resting at
the bottom of the sea and the triple rhyme will bail this stanza out.
"Stilly couches she" is indeed a wonderful counterbalance to the
unwieldy pile-up of stresses ushering it in. The two I's - a "liquid" con–
sonant - in "stilly" almost convey the gently rocking body of the ship.
As for the rhyme, it clinches the femininity of the ship, already empha–
sized by the verb "couches." For the purposes of the poem, this sugges–
tion is indeed timely.
What does our poet's deportment in this stanza and, above all, in its
third line tell us about him? That he is a very calculating fellow (at least
he counts his stresses). Also, that his pen is driven less by a sense of har–
mony than by his central idea, and that his triple rhyme is a euphonic ne–
cessity second and a structural device first. As rhymes go, what we've got
in this stanza is no great shakes. The best that can be said about it is that
