JOSEPH BRODSKY
371
it is highly functional and reverberates the wonderful fifteenth-century
poem sometimes attributed to Dunbar:
In what estate so ever I be
Timor mortus conturbat me .
"All Christian people, behold and see:
This world is but a vanity
And replete with necessity.
Timor mortis conturbat me ."
It's quite possible that these lines indeed set "The Convergence of the
Twain" in motion, because it is a poem above
all
about vanity and ne–
cessity, as well, of course, as about fear of death. However, what perturbs
the seventy-two-year-old Thomas Hardy in his poem is precisely necessity.
Steel chambers, late the pyres
Of her salamandrine fires,
Cold currents thrid, and turn to rhythmic tidal lyres.
We are indeed on an underwater journey here, and although the rhymes
are not getting any better (we encounter our old friend "lyres"), this
stanza is striking because of its visual content. We are clearly in the en–
gine room, and the entire machinery is seen quiveringly refracted by wa–
ter. The word that really stars in this stanza is "salamandrine." Apart
from its mythological and metallurgical connotations, this four-syllable–
long, lizard-like epithet marvelously evokes the quivering motion of the
element directly opposite to water: fire. Extinguished, yet sustained, as it
were, by refractions.
Continued on page 459
