31 March

Titanic poetry

1909 On this day in Belfast, the keel was laid down in Harland & Wolff shipyard number 401 for the vessel that would be named the Titanic.

The largest passenger steamship ever built by man, the White Star Line’s flagship would also, it was fondly expected, cross the Atlantic at blue-ribbon-winning speed, offering unprecedented levels of luxury (in first class) and comfort (in steerage).

On its maiden voyage, on 14 April 1912, the Titanic, popularly believed unsinkable, struck an iceberg. The provision of lifeboats was inadequate and the launching of them botched. 1,517 of the 2,223 souls on board perished.

The Titanic was not merely a technological achievement but expressed, poetically, that quality the ancients called hubris. The name itself hinted that there might be something dangerously prideful. In Keats’s poem, Hyperion, the Titans are the giant race of gods who are displaced by the smaller, smarter, classier Olympians. Size is not enough.

The sinking of the Titanic provoked what Aristotle, in his treatise on tragedy, called ‘pity and fear’ on both sides of the Atlantic – and reams of poetry expressing those emotions. By general agreement the best poem inspired by the event was Thomas Hardy’s ‘The Convergence of the Twain’ (1915). For the sage of Wessex the sinking of the Titanic was a clear demonstration of the essential ‘irony’ of the human condition.

VI

Well: while was fashioning

This creature of cleaving wing,

The Immanent Will that stirs and urges everything

VII

Prepared a sinister mate

For her – so gaily great –

A Shape of Ice, for the time fat and dissociate.

VIII

And as the smart ship grew

In stature, grace, and hue

In shadowy silent distance grew the Iceberg too.

IX

Alien they seemed to be:

No mortal eye could see

The intimate welding of their later history.

There is less consensus as to what is the worst poem to be inspired by the sinking of the Titanic. A majority vote goes to the Australian poet, Christopher Thomas Nixon, who was quick off the mark in the last weeks of 1912 with ‘The Passing of the Titanic (Sic transit gloria mundi)’. Of epic length, it opens:

Through deep-sea gates of famed Southampton’s bay,

A mammoth liner swings in churning slide

Her regal tread ridged opaline gulfs asway,

And gauntlet flings to chance, wind, shoal and tide.

Ark wonderful! Palatial town marine,

Invention’s flower, rose-peak of skill-wrought plan;

The jewelled crown of Art the wizard, seen

Since Noah’s trade in Shinar’s land began.

It does not improve over the following 150 lines.

Less lofty was the popular song of 1912, ‘My Sweetheart Went Down with the Ship’:

My Sweetheart went down with the ship,

Down to an ocean grave,

One of the heroes who gave his life,

The women and children to save,

Gone but not forgotten,

Tho’ the big ship rolled and dipt’

He went to sleep in the ocean deep,

My Sweetheart went down with the ship.

The Oscar-winning 1997 film Titanic inspired another tidal wave of verse, much of it by schoolchildren as classwork. Many anthologies’ worth can be found on the web.