Content Warning: This section includes references to sexual assault and rape.

Hardy’s poem transfers agency away from humans via personification, a poetic device that endows inanimate objects or ideas with human characteristics or abilities. In this case, he rejects the idea that humans could have prevented the catastrophe; rather, he recasts the event as a mythically unavoidable doom that befell two large beings led together by forces far outside human control.

Hardy’s speaker personifies several non-sapient things in the poem: the ship, the fish, the “Immanent Will” (Line 18), and the iceberg. This allows the reader to have an emotional reaction to the events without directly imagining the actual victims’ suffering. The first description of the ship builds on the convention of referring to sea-going vessels with feminine pronouns to imagine that the wreck “stilly couches she” (Line 3) on the ocean floor. The image is that of a woman reclining on a divan, not a metal machine getting torn apart. The poem then casts its eye back to see the ship growing “[i]n stature, grace, and hue” (Line 23)—traits that typically identify women of high status. As Hardy will eventually portray the disaster as a kind of fateful marriage, the ship takes on the bridal characteristics of a young woman, dressed up and sent on her maiden voyage, only to be thwarted by vengeful Fate.