Hardy speaks of the wreck of the Titanic in this poem. He speaks of the opulence that is now covered over sea-worms,

Over the mirrors meant
To glass the opulent
The sea-worm crawls grotesque, slimed, dumb, indifferent.

The sea-worms are indifferent to the previous majesty of the ship. He offers the reader a picture of beautiful jewels,

Jewels in joy designed
To ravish the sensuous mind

and then uses alliteration to hammer home that the beauty of those jewels is gone, "Lie lightless, all their sparkles bleared and black and blind." That line of has the feeling of a sinking ship, "bleared and black and blind."

Hardy did not believe in a higher being and he was convinced that there were forces that control us but those forces couldn’t care at all what we did or didn’t do. In this poem he illustrates the indifference of the sea-life to the previous opulence of the Titanic and her passengers.