Recorded in a tiny little canyon that I never learned the name for, but it was peaceful and quiet. Everyone should have a peaceful, quiet little place to read a poem every now and again.
As I mention in the commentary, this is interesting because it's simultaneously modern -- I mean, it's talking about an event in the 20th century! -- but also has something older about it. All of Thomas Hardy does, I think, and this in particular. We don't worry much about the role that Fates play in our lives these days.
#### TEXT OF POEM
"The Convergence of the Twain" by Thomas Hardy
(Lines on the loss of the "Titanic")
I
In a solitude of the sea
Deep from human vanity,
And the Pride of Life that planned her, stilly couches she.
II
Steel chambers, late the pyres
Of her salamandrine fires,
Cold currents thrid, and turn to rhythmic tidal lyres.
III
Over the mirrors meant
To glass the opulent
The sea-worm crawls -- grotesque, slimed, dumb, indifferent.
IV
Jewels in joy designed
To ravish the sensuous mind
Lie lightless, all their sparkles bleared and black and blind.
V
Dim moon-eyed fishes near
Gaze at the gilded gear
And query: "What does this vaingloriousness down here?" ...
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 far 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,
X
Or sign that they were bent
By paths coincident
On being anon twin halves of one august event,
XI
Till the Spinner of the Years
Said "Now!" And each one hears,
And consummation comes, and jars two hemispheres.
Episode 117: Billy Collins' "The Lanyard"
Episode 116: Donne's Holy Sonnet VII ("At the Round Earth's Imagin'd Corners, Blow")
Episode 115: Hughes' "I, Too, Sing America"
Episode 114: Donne's "Good Friday, 1613, Riding Westward"
Episode 113: William Carlos Williams' "This is Just to Say"
Episode 112: Stevens' "Thirteen Ways of Looking at A Blackbird"
Episode 111: Anonymous' "Wulf" (translated from the Anglo-Saxon by Kevin Crossley-Holland)
Episode 110: Keats' "To One Who Has Been Long in City Pent"
Episode 109: Dickinson's "Some Keep the Sabbath by Going to Church"
Episode 108: Frost's "Two Tramps in Mud Time"
Episode 107: Yeats' "Lake Isle of Innisfree"
Episode 106: Silverstein's "Sick"
Episode 105: Shelley's "Ozymandias"
Episode 104: E. E. Cummings' "i thank You God for most this amazing"
Episode 103: Louis Simpson's "Chocolates"
Episode 102: Hayden's "Those Winter Sundays"
Episode 101: Milton's "When I Consider How My Light Is Spent"
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