The poem’s dramatic title describes two separated things coming together. There is speculation that Hardy may have chosen the lofty title “The Convergence of the Twain” to point to the disaster’s epic levels of hubris: the failure of technology, the arrogance of the rich, and the folly of testing the limits of fate. Hardy wrote the poem for a disaster relief fundraiser on May 14, 1912, an event that took place a month after the Titanic sank. The poem’s epigraph—“(Lines on the loss of the “Titanic”)—makes it clear that the “convergence” is a negative joining rather than a positive one.

The poem is an elegy—a form of poetry written to commemorate the dead. However, the expected elegiac tone found in most occasional poems is absent here. Instead of concentrating on the great loss of life, the poem surveys the wreck of the liner on the ocean floor. It does not represent the events on the boat before, during, and after the wreck from the perspective of its human passengers. Rather, the first five stanzas pass judgment on the hubris that went into boasting about the ship’s specialness by concentrating on its ruin.