Poetry Ch. 4 Imagery (3)

"And as the smart ship grew
In stature, grace, and hue,
In shadowy silent distance grew the Iceberg too." Pg. 779

The poem "The Convergence of the Twain" has an interesting form and pattern to it. The stanzas consist of two short lines followed by one longer line. I think that the author does this to demonstrate the way things can happen with little expectancy. The two shorter lines preclude the longer line and give little warning to what is really happening. The sinking of the Titanic also sunk with little warning. All three lines in each stanza rhyme. To me this helps the flow of the poem going forward. It also shows that the three lines are a set.

Also, the first five stanzas focus on just the Titanic, her previous beauty, and her situation now. The sixth stanza focuses on the iceberg. And the last five stanzas focus on the meeting of the two. I think that author fashions the stanzas in a reverse chronological order. I think it makes sense though because usually readers know what happened in the past and move forward with a work to find out what happens next. In this situation, I feel that the author starts with the Titanic's fate because nearly everybody already knows how the tale ends. The author then goes back in time to that fateful point when the ship and Iceberg collide because that is the point that most people overlook because they just focus on the end tragedy.