Sunday, November 10, 2019
Poems from E.J. Pratt’s The Titanic Essay
 The Canadian poet E.J. Pratt’s lyrical documentation and divulgings on life aboard a ship and by the sea can easily be categorized and confined under the label of â€Å"maritime poetry,† but the sentiments evoked in his poems appear to consitute more than the said label, the following is an overview and interpretation of Pratt’s poems taken from The Titanic. Harland and Wolff Works, Belfast, May 31, 1911            The poem begins, â€Å"The hammers silent and the derricks still, / And high tide in the harbour! Mind and will†¦Ã¢â‚¬ setting the tone of calmness at bay, which begins to shift as it progresses towards the middle and end. The first two lines is continued further by seemingly rudimentary coupling rhymes until the end of the poem. The content however, relates the instance of a ship – the Titanic – in its completion, and the celebration of its first launch. Pratt relates the beauty and grandeur of the ship without over embellishing, and sounding-off the luxuries it possesses which others allude to. And without the title implying that the poem is about the iconic unsinkable ship, one can easily mistake the ship being described in the poem as one of any commonplace ships in existence. The seeming inane and banal instance of a ship doing what it is supposed to do in the first place is transformed and elevated in E.J. Pratt’s poetry, when relating to the ship he writes, â€Å"Before another year was over, she, / Poised for the launching signal, had surpassed / The dreams of builder or navigator†¦ Glass crashed against the plates; a wine cascade, / Netting the sunlight in a shower of pearls, / Baptized the bow and gave the ship her name; A slight push of the rams as a switch set free.†Of course, Pratt isn’t just talking about any other ship, but the poem nevertheless romanticizes the idea of it, from construction, to its completion, to its launch, which were aptly articulated in the previously quoted lines, and further concluded by, â€Å"†¦for whatever fears stalked with her down the tallow of slips / Were smothered under by the harbour cheers, / By flags strung halyards of the ships.†March 3. 1912            The second poem in the compilation retreats to the instance of the Titanic upon its creation, the first line cries out, â€Å"Completed! Waiting for her trial spin†¦Ã¢â‚¬ It then relates the myth which the ship is ascribed of being, massive and grand, and therefore, impenetrable and unsinkable. The said mythology is affirmed faithfully in the following lines, â€Å"An ocean lifeboat in herself†¦ No wave could sweep those upper decks – unthinkable! No storm could hurt that hull – the papers said so. The perfect ship at last – the first unsinkable.†The poem continues to elucidate on the marvelous piece of work the ship that Titanic is by enumerating on the qualities of its every part, from its upper decks, to its watertight compartments, bulhead doors and bouyancy. Despite the naivety and evident falseness of the said claims, Pratt is able to effectively deliver the sentiment and ideas of the people at the time, and the poem encapsulates the extent of this naà ¯ve ideology. The Iceberg            The force of nature which challenges the pronounced invincibility of the Titanic is laid evident in the title and extent of this particular poem. It describes the ship’s initial encounter with the glacier, the details of which is reserved to the succeeding poem, and revolves instead on the massive structure which led the ship to its demise. The iceberg being described as, â€Å"†¦the brute and palaeolithic outline of a face fronted the transatlantic shipping route. A sloping spur that tapered to a claw / And lying twenty feet below†¦Ã¢â‚¬            It was especially entertaining how the crash of the ship with the glacier was attributed as the iceberg’s fault, or to fate perhaps, but at any rate, because nature took a different course, instead of the iceberg keeping to where it was, floated closer to the ship, as referred to in the following lines, â€Å"But with an impulse governed by the raw mechanics of its birth, it drifted where ambushed, fog-grey, it stumbled on its lair,†and the rest of the world knows what happens then. Southhampton, Wednesday, April 10, 1912            The part of the poem which picks up after the instance of the iceberg, when the seemingly unsinkable and invincible ship engages the massive glacier, and all that is left to be articulated is â€Å"An omen struck the thousands to shore – A double accident!†The Titanic proved to be less than what it was mythically ascribed of being, and the extent of the poem goes into lyrical details over the tragedy that is the sinking of the Titanic. How it threw sailors and countless individuals to the mercy of the sea. But the chaos and destruction that is to be attributed to the instance of a ship clashing with an iceberg is subdued, or muted by describing not the havoc being wreaked on the ship, or the people aboard it, but the state of the rest of the world at that particular point in time, as the ship was sinking, as articulated in the latter part of the poem, in which the poet contemplates, â€Å"When water flowed from the inverted tips / Of a waning moon, of sun-hounds, of the shrieks / Of whirling shags around the mizzen peaks. / And was there not this morning’s augury / For the big one now heading for the sea?†It’s a valid inquiry, and a refreshing take on the apparent tragedy. Wednesday Evening            Shifting towards a different context and setting, and describing a seeming sumptious feast consituted by â€Å"cauldrons of stock, purees and consommes, simmered with peppercorns and marjoram.†as well as crabs, clams, fricassees, lambs, veals, halibut, bechamel, truffles, and a myriad of food bound to whet anybody’s appetite, and which would bring people to believe that everything was fine, in the comfort and luxury afforded by the said array of food.            The said sentiment was aptly articulated as such, â€Å"The dinner gave the sense that all was well: That touch of ballast in the tanks; the feel of peace from ramparts unassailable, Which, added to her seven decks of steel, had constituted the Titanic less.†           It culminates ironically, in the event of people partaking of the food, engaging in elitist nonsense, and forgetting the senseless tragedy that was Titanic, and resorting to issues of greater importance, as articulated in the last part of the poem, â€Å"The crowd poured through the sumptuous rooms and hall†¦ tapped at the tables of the Regency; Smirked at the caryatids on the walls; Talked Jacobean-wise†¦ Swallowed liqueurs and coffee as they sat under the Georgian carved mahogany, dictating wireless hieroglyphics that would on the opening of the board rooms rock the pillared dollars of a railroad stock.â€
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