Was This, Perhaps, Only The Beginning Of An Epidemic? [April 15th, 1912]

The iceberg's unavoidable intrusion

might be described as virulent infection:

the great unsinkable liner was doomed.

And all our lives suddenly changed direction.

The techinal prowess proved wishful thinking---

facts not in evidence, merely presumed:

nothing could keep that massive iron from sinking.

Those dead outnumbered the surviving living.

Neither the frigid ice nor chilling water

apologized, or sought any forgiving.

I cast about to find a metaphor:

death, massively inflicted in profusion---

what kind of meaning can it really yield?

I think of a fog-covered battlefield---

and dying screams;  countless slain in the slaughter.

Perhaps old Wells can make a science fiction

tale; no one could imagine the prediction

realized as fact---all Europe making war.


Starward

Author's Notes/Comments: 

I have longed believed that the sinking of the Titanic was a prefigurement of the outbreak of World War I, followed by the flu epidemic of 1919.  And both are prefiguerments of the Covid epidemic and the war in Ukraine.  In her novel, The Last Man (1826) Mary Shelley predicted the possibility of a world-wide epidemic---and is also credited with having created apocalyptic science fiction.  In his stunning, intensely beautiful and sorrowful novel, The Summer Of Katya, the novelist Trevanian gives a verbal portrait of the belief that both Wolrd Wars were mere posturing; a belief that Trevanian's narrator in that novel wryly deflates.  (By the way, I highly recommend Karta for your reading.  Trevanian wrote the novel with two subsequent conclusions, one to the immediate story, and one to the subsequent time in which the narrator tells us of his love for Katya.  You will not see  either coming.  The first conclusion will sock you in the gut so poignantly and emotionally, that you might want to puke, as I did, in January, 1990.  The second, especially the final sentence, is one of the most effectively chilling conclusions I have ever read.)

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saiom's picture

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can you tell us what the final sentence is

 

drowning is horrible multiplied by the freezing waters and the separation of men from their wives



 

 

S74rW4rd's picture

I would have to refer you to

I would have to refer you to the text of the novel itself---well worthy acquiring a copy.


Starward