The second and final line in this verse uses some alliteration and links to he irony of ‘human vanity.’ It says, “And the Pride of Life that planned her, stilly couches she.” The first part of this line links to the pride of human vanity. This is because it means that it was one of the proudest things man was thought to have done but in the end it sunk and now lies at the bottom of the ocean, I know this because of the line “stilly couches she.” This line also shows some alliteration of the sound ‘ill.’ This sound is mentioned also in the first line of the poem in the word solitude. That is only a weak sound so it is quite effective as it reflects with the ship lying very still and cold at the bottom of the sea.
The “Harp song of the Dane women” is very different. It is talking about the persona of a Viking woman. It is written as if it is a song and that she is complaining that as soon as the spring comes, all their husbands will go and see their boats and travel off to sea. I noticed that both of the poems are exploring loss due to the sea and that it is like a snatcher of things that are precious to humans. Kipling personifies the sea in the whole poem; he starts this in the first verse by saying, “What is a woman that you forsake her and the hearth-fire and the home acre, To go with the old grey Widow-maker?” This starts the poem with a sense of rivalry against the Viking women and the sea. The Viking women are saying why go with her when you have your loving wives at home? Kipling personifies the sea by calling her the ‘Widow-maker.’ This is what shows a slight sense of loss in the poem. By calling the sea the Widow-maker, it implies that she makes women widows, by drowning hem or capsizing their boas when they go out to sea.
A great contrast in the first verses to show the sense of loss in each of the poems is that they both show the sense of loss differently. Hardy shows the sense of loss as a loss of pride to man and Kipling shows it as loss of love and a person rather than materialistically as Hardy does.
In the second verse of Hardy’s poem, it talks about the movement of the waves and shows contrasts of hot and cold, it carries on to refer about loss in a slightly less obvious way but more ironically. “Steel chambers, late the pyres Of her salamandrine fires, Cold currents third, and turn to rhythmic tidal lyres.” The first line of this verse starts with the sense of loss and irony; it talks about pyres. Pyres are associated with cremation and in funerals, his gives us a sense of loss as it is like the ship has died. This personifies the ship and gives us a sign of irony towards the ship dying or sinking because of the unsinkable factor, which I mentioned before. The atmosphere of the poem stays cold, but here is a good contrast that is made between cold and hot twice in this verse. The second line mentions ‘salamandrine fires.’ This contrasts with the third line, which starts with ‘Cold currents.’ This contrast is very effective as it shows that the ship was ho first like it was alive and now it is cold because it is dead. After this contrast, the last part of the verse talks about ‘rhythmic tidal lyres.’ A lyre is an old instrument and by using it alongside the word ‘tidal’ we can almost sense the movement of the waves, like the waves are being played like instruments by the sea to sound like ‘rhythmic tidal lyres.’
