Page:Life of Thomas Hardy - Brennecke.pdf/239

 of bringing in "Hal" and his notoriously complex domestic problems. The whole poem was a most unusual thing to find in Hardy: an example of really bad work. A sudden and complete transition from the ridiculous to the sublime may be effected by turning to examine another occasional poem, the lines of the loss of the "Titanic," The Convergence of the Twain. From the first stanza,

to the last,

the language and the thought achieve an exaltation and a grandeur that touch the heart of the reader more forcibly and tellingly than any more sensational or sentimental treatment of the theme could possibly do. Here the "Immanent Will, that stirs and urges everything" definitely displaced the poet's earlier and more awkward conception of Chance and Time as agents of Destiny.

The ballads of the Napoleonic wars found in the Wessex Poems represent Hardy's continued interest in a theme that had already occasioned The Trumpet-Major and was eventually to find its consummation in The Dynasts. Edmund Gosse wrote that they were conceived, and a few lines written, long before their completion.