"Till the Spinner of the Years / Said 'Now!' And each one hears, / And consummation comes, and jars two hemispheres" ("The Convergence of the Twain," 31-33).
The only other time I remember hearing the word "twain" is in Rowan Atkinson's "Amazing Jesus." The part I quoted is between 2:35 and 2:55:
At first, when I read the title and the helpful epigraph, I thought that the "twain" might have been two halves of the ship, or something. Did the Titanic break in two? I don't know these things.
However, the "twain" are the vain and "opulent" Titanic (8) and its "sinister mate" (19), the iceberg. Of course, the poem's denotative situation is the meeting of those two separate spheres. What I liked about the structure was that in each stanza, there were two lines of approximate length x followed by a third line of approximate length 2x. The stanza construction in which two lines "converged" into a third line that was twice as long reflects the convergence of the Titanic and the iceberg.
The other question I want to answer is what I think of the "Immanent Will" and the "Spinner of the Years." I absolutely loved the final stanza where "the Spinner of the Years / Said 'Now!'" (31-32). At first, it made me think of God's commands in the creation story. However, I don't think God is the undefined Being in the poem. The text says that the Being created "a sinister mate" (19), which is not what an benevolent God would do; it also uses the word "consummation" (33), which suggests to me a fulfillment of what was inevitably going to occur. Therefore, I think the "Immanent Will" and the "Spinner of the Years" are fate.
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