Today’s Poem: The Convergence of the Twain

For Thomas Hardy’s birthday, tercets about the Titanic

William Rothenstein, Thomas Hardy, 1897 (Wikimedia Commons)

We’ve noted before in this space that even among the not-inconsiderable demographic of novelist-poets, or poet-novelists, of the last hundred years or so, Thomas Hardy (1840–1928) is unusual. Although he was writing poems by the age of sixteen, his serious emergence as a poet, with the publicati…