The Titanic sank on April 15, 1912. Nine days later, Thomas Hardy composed a poem about the disaster called “The Convergence of the Twain.” Many poets were mourning the dead; Hardy took a different approach. He asked readers to contemplate the accident’s prehistory: to imagine how, even as the great ship was being built, the iceberg—its “sinister mate”—had also been growing. “No mortal eye could see / The intimate welding of their later history,” Hardy wrote. But, even so, “They were bent / By paths coincident / On being anon twin halves of one august event.”
