Sinking of the RMS Titanic Sinking of the RMS Titanic "Titanic" received six warnings of sea ice on 14 April but was travelling near her maximum speed when her lookouts sighted the iceberg. Unable to turn quickly enough, the ship suffered a glancing blow that buckled her starboard side and opened five of her sixteen compartments to the sea. "Titanic" had been designed to stay afloat with four of her forward compartments flooded but no more, and the crew soon realised that the ship would sink. They used distress flares and radio (wireless) messages to attract help as the passengers were put into lifeboats. In
RMS Titanic in popular culture Convergence of the Twain" (1912), his "Lines on the Loss of the "Titanic"", was a considerably more substantial work. His poem sets "Titanic" in a pessimistic post-Darwinian contrast between the achievements and arrogance of man and the humbling power of nature. The building of "Titanic" in its unprecedented scale is contrasted with the origins of its nemesis, following a familiar nineteenth-century notion of the double or "doppelgänger" (a theme most famously realised in "Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde"): <poem> And as the smart ship grew In stature, grace and hue, In shadowy silent distance grew the Iceberg