quote:
Hecht may have got the idea for the title from Tolstoy, but modelled the verse on Robert Service.
Harold Lowe at least would have approved - he was a Service fan.
I came across so much
Titanic verse dedicated to the crew alone - and particularly Smith - when trawling through UK newspapers that I wrote an article for the ADB on the subject a couple of years ago. Genuine pathos sits side by side, almost indiscriminately, with laughable bathos. It's no wonder that Shaw wrote such a searing column on the swill that was circulating - when he says that some writers were handing paens to Captain Smith that they would hardly write for Nelson, it's a good description of some of the Smith poems (some of which have the Captain going down with his ship in raging sea and wave, glibly adding him to the pantheon of heroic British figures like Raleigh).
Momentous occasions - particularly tragic ones - move people to express themselves in verse. Lincoln's death saw such an overwhelming outpouring of such truly dreadful poetry - particularly wretched doggeral - that one newspaper felt obliged to inform its readers that it did not wish to receive any more poems that mentioned tolling bells. From
Lincoln has arisen and sheds a fire
That makes America aspire! it ranged the full gamult - Tom Taylor's poem appearing with a Tennial cartoon of Britannia mourning with Columbia was
Punch's apology in verse for the previous tone of his cartoons on the US President and, in spite of its excesses and some of the contrived archaisms that it was thought were appropriate to grief, is genuinely moving. Some of Whitman's lyrical lines on Lincoln's death have entered the canon of poetic quotes (e.g. 'O Captain, My Captain'). Billy Collins, American Poet Laureate, captured something of why we turn to poetry in times of grief, both personal and "public" (e.g. the death of the Princess of Wales or, more recently and overwhelmingly, the September 11 attacks), when he wrote that:
quote:
Poetry has always accommodated loss and keening; it may be said to be the original grief counseling center.
If you can wade through the dross, and sift through the hardened conventions of lamentation (some of which can trace their antecedents to the ancient world classical works), these poems can tell us much as cultural artifacts of their age. Be it a song on the tomb wall of an Ancient Egyptian or published on the letters paper of the local rag, they can be valuable tools in understanding and interpreting history and culture. And they don't even need to be good to do that
Many years ago I read a book on the Titanic and darned if I can remember the name or author of the book.The book included a short poem that had been gleaned from newspapers at the time of the tragedy.Unfortunately I can only remember one verse of the poem and was wondering if anyone else knew it.the verse I remember goes like this: 
