{"id":59,"date":"2011-03-26T00:03:32","date_gmt":"2011-03-26T00:03:32","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/mtls.ca\/test\/?page_id=59"},"modified":"2019-03-29T21:44:16","modified_gmt":"2019-03-29T21:44:16","slug":"george-elliott-clarke","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/www.mtls.ca\/issue12\/writings\/essay\/george-elliott-clarke","title":{"rendered":"George Elliott Clarke"},"content":{"rendered":"

Contemplating the Titanic Poetically<\/strong><\/h1>\n
George Elliott Clarke<\/h6>\n

The sinking of the S.S. Titanic, 100 years ago, off the south coast of Newfoundland, still resonates, in part, because it was a catastrophe for which there is no photographic record. Commentators are thus forced to imagine it, to try to realize its horror and shock; to be, in metaphor, witnesses and survivors. So, in the wake of the maritime disaster, three poets take up the task of contemplation, one immediately and two others decades later, but all moved to consider the Titanic’s maiden \u201c and fatal \u201c voyage. (Indeed, the Titanic’s foundering conjoins two separate states: the virginal and the mortal; in a sense, the ship’s sinking resembles a pathetic Virgin Death with all the poignancy associated with the dying of a maiden.) All three accounts are irreverent. After all, the Titanic’s loss presents a reality check for anyone who thinks that technology is, in any way, a match for nature.<\/p>\n

The great British novelist and poet Thomas Hardy (1840-1928) ponders the tragedy in his The Convergence of the Twain, a poem written and published in 1912, when the dead aboard the broken ship were still corpses, not skeletons. Hardy imagines the feminized liner, a product of human vanity,\u009d now Deep,\u009din a solitude of the sea,\u009d where \u0153stilly couches she. That verb, couches,\u009d is meant to conjure a woman in the posture of lovemaking  \u201c or birthing \u201c or, of course, dying or dead. Thus, moon-eyed fishes\u009d deem the vessel as vaingloriousness, while all her cleaving\u009d seductiveness now lays a waste: “Over the mirrors meant \/ To glass the opulent \/ The sea-worm crawls”  grotesque, slimed, dumb, indifferent.\u009d<\/p>\n

Hardy views the ship as a bride Prepared for a sinister mate,\u009d i.e. the Iceberg,\u009d a glistening, shadowy groom. Their meeting is an intimate welding and twin halves of one august event so that consummation comes, and jars two hemispheres: It is a marriage made in Hell; or a cosmic joke: man’s technological pride gets laid or “laid low \u201d by an anonymous, ephemeral, and icy paramour. Arguably, Hardy reads the downfall of the Titanic as being similar to the tragic fate of one of his own Victorian heroines, such as Tess of the D’Urbervilles<\/em>.<\/p>\n

Newfoundland-born pastor, poet, and professor of English at the University of Toronto, E.J. Pratt (1882-1964), pondered the Titanic in an eponymous poem, published in 1935. Schooled in both Darwin and demonology, Pratt terms the Titanic the Primate of the Lines.\u009d That last word refers, simultaneously, to steamship companies, latitude and longitude, and the genealogies of human invention (from the wheel to the automobile). Where Hardy writes a tidy sermon, Pratt treats us to a cinematic survey of the ship’s sumptuous construction, but unlucky launch, as well as of its creature comforts: “On the shelves were pyramids \/ Of truffles, sprigs of thyme and watercress, \/ Bay leaf and parsley, savouries to dress \/ Shad roes and sweetbreads broiling on the grids.”\u009d Hardy shows us the twin development of ship and iceberg, and so does Pratt: \u00e2\u20ac\u0153Pressure and glacial time had stratified \/ The berg to the consistency of flint,\u009d yes, but it also resembles a floating cathedral, \u00e2\u20ac\u0153Ringing the passage of the parallels.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d<\/p>\n

The Titanic is master of the Lines, but the iceberg commands the parallels\u009d: The duel of the duo is on. But we know the victor: The Titanic goes down, but “The grey shape with the palaeolithic face of the iceberg\u201d remains the master of the longitudes.\u009d Pratt’s Titanic is a properly long, dramatic, and great poem (easily besting James Cameron’s film), and only a Newfoundland preacher who saw deaths-by-drowning could have written it.<\/p>\n

African-American poet Etheridge Knight (1931-1991) gives the Titanic calamity a ‘lol’\u009d treatment in his rollicking ballad, “I Sing of Shine”,\u009dlikely published in 1968. Based on a 1920s-era rap, Knight’s poem celebrates a black stoker who turns down offers of money and sex to save white folks lives, and, instead, jumps from the sinking ship. When a white preacher tries to interfere with his stroke, Shine cuts the man’s throat, and is, by dawn, sitting in a Harlem bar, getting drunk. Clearly, the Titanic is the stuff of legend.  As such, it is more unsinkable than the actual ship proved to be.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Contemplating the Titanic Poetically George Elliott Clarke The sinking of the S.S. Titanic, 100 years ago, off the south coast of Newfoundland, still resonates, in part, because it was a catastrophe for which there is no photographic record. Commentators are thus forced to imagine it, to try to realize its horror and shock; to be, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"parent":46,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","template":"authorpage.php","meta":{"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"footnotes":""},"class_list":["post-59","page","type-page","status-publish","hentry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.mtls.ca\/issue12\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/59","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.mtls.ca\/issue12\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.mtls.ca\/issue12\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mtls.ca\/issue12\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mtls.ca\/issue12\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=59"}],"version-history":[{"count":9,"href":"https:\/\/www.mtls.ca\/issue12\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/59\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1411,"href":"https:\/\/www.mtls.ca\/issue12\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/59\/revisions\/1411"}],"up":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mtls.ca\/issue12\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/46"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.mtls.ca\/issue12\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=59"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}