powerful or the less immanent its determination must be, for there must
be something in his knowledge that lets him know why things might be
otherwise. If his poetic form really represented total predestination, in
other words, no reader would ever be able to tell, and hence Hardy had
to insist that his work was in no way unconscious or unforeseen, for
relinquishing active consciousnesswould imply the utter domination of
the Will. But by the same token, such consciousness gains a sense of
itself only by being thwarted, so the poem must display the coerciveness
of the form manipulating its material, careless and self-consciously
awkward at the same time. It is as though Hardy the poet both animates
andendures the ‘reflex’, ‘unconscious’, ‘instinctive’ Immanent Will he
accuses of wrecking lives, as he describes ship and iceberg in ‘The
Convergence of the Twain’:
Alien they seemed to be:
No mortal eye could see
The intimate welding of their later history.
‘Welding’ suggests the recalcitrance of the separate elements: as if to
point out the strain of the join, the third beat of that last line falls firmly
on ‘of’, which, like the hull of theTitaniccrumpled by the iceberg, cannot
bear the resulting stress-impetus. The rhyme-scheme is also carefully
arranged so that despite its apparentaaahomogeneity, several words
(such as ‘history’ above) are forced to rhyme on an unstressed syllable:
In a solitude of the sea
Deep from human vanity,
And the Pride of Life that planned her, stilly couches she.
[.. .]
Over the mirrors meant
To glass the opulent
The sea-worm crawls – grotesque, slimed, dumb, indifferent.
The welding of the rhymes is audible in the wrenched double stress on
‘indı ́ffere ́nt’, as if two things were being forced together and made to fit –
and the parallels with Hardy’s strained marriage here in the word ‘con-
summation’ are ominous. But the stress illustrates the poem’s paradox
perfectly, that to pronounce it as the poem demands also involves a
certain drawing-out of the word. Simultaneously, the form of the poem
is indifferent to the normal pronunciation of ‘indifferent’, and yet that
very indifference makes the word all too conscious of what it’s doing. The
very indifference of the sea worm is, for the poem, an insult to the dead
lying around those mirrors whose carrion it is presumably feeding on, and
158 British Poetry in the Age of Modernism