Hap

In explicating "Hap," focus on the ways in which it represents what I say above about Hardy's view of the world being ruled only by happenstance, chance, and situational irony.

The whole poem is about chance, that being the meaning of its name even. The speaker is unhappy due to some sort of misfortune in chance. In the first stanza, he says that if a “vengeful god” would just tell him that “thy sorrow is [my] ecstacy” that this god might take some joy from the speaker’s own pain, then he could bear the hard, being “Half-eased in that a Powerfuller then I//Had willed and meted me the tears I shed.” Meaning that he could then bear it because it meant that someone had gotten pleasure from his sorrow. However, he then says that this is not so. He doesn’t believe that he has been given his lot by gods, but by time and chance and that “The purblind Doomsters had as readily strown//Blisses about my pilgramage as pain.” Which leads him to believe that his bad times could have just as easily been good times, but for the matter of chance.

What stood out the most for you?