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Alliteration In Hardy's 'Titanic And Her Collision With The Iceberg'

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How does Hardy successfully depict the Titanic and her collision with the iceberg in the poem? In the poem, Hardy uses effective methods of contrasting and comparing the Titanic and the Iceberg to make them almost look like they are the same entity. They grew up together, and it was their fate for them to eventually meet. He personifies them to make them more relatable to the human reader, and it helps Hardy to get the reader to see their relationship in the same way as he does. Hardy uses alliteration in his stanzas to get a sense of what he is describing through sound. The first two stanzas describe the ‘current’ state of the Titanic. The alliteration of ‘solitude of the sea’ suggests the quiet hissing noise of the sea. ‘Stilly couches she’ sounds like the whispering of a ghost, because that is what the Titanic is, a …show more content…

These words are then juxtaposed with ‘The sea-worm crawls - grotesque, slimed and indifferent’ and ‘Lie lightless, all their sparkles bleared and black and blind’ to bring the reader back to reality, and to realise how much the ship has changed. ‘Well while was’ is an alliteration symbolises the slow, but powerful movement of the waves.The ‘w’ is quite soft and contrasts with the harsh sound of the ‘c’ in ‘creature of cleaving wing’. Personally, I get a sense of a knife cutting through soft butter, the butter being the ocean and the knife being the Titanic. In this stanza, the Titanic is depicted as quite a harsh and powerful being, just everyone thought it was. In stanza seven, the relation of the Titanic and the iceberg is almost described as a fatal love story. Hardy is saying that it wasn 't coincidence that the twain met, it was fate that drove them together. No one even thought such an event would happen, but fate knew what was to happen all

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