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Essay on "HAP" by Thomas Hardy
Thomas Hardy (1840-1928) was one of the great writers of the Late Victorian era. One of his great works out of the many that he produced was his poem Hap, which he wrote in 1866, but did not publish until 1898 in his collection of poems called Wessex Poems.
In the poem "Hap" Hardy expresses his belief in God's absolute indifference to the concerns of man. Human existence is portrayed as accidental by a God who had given up all responsibility for the welfare of the race (Collins, 1990).
The poem “Hap” seems to typify the sense of alienation that he and other writers were experiencing at the time, as they saw their times as marked by accelerating social and technological change and by the burden of a worldwide empire. The poem also reveals Hardy's own abiding sense of a universe ruled by a blind or hostile fate, a world whose landscapes are etched with traces of the fleeting stories of their inhabitants. The poem's major theme seems to be this sense of the world being ruled by a hostile and blind fate, not by a benevolent God pushing all of the buttons.
The poem "Hap" demonstrates many of these issues that Hardy was facing. The first word of the poem, "If," depicts the uncertainty of Hardy's faith in both God and his own idea about what/who God is.
In the first stanza he writes of his desire that “some vengeful god would call to [him]/ From up the sky and laugh.” He wishes that the god would admit to taking joy from the suffering of the lowly mortal. Why does Hardy ask for such a sadistic, vengeful god? Hardy gives his answer in the second stanza of the poem. He writes that the existence of such a god would allow him to bear his sufferings with a feeling of righteous anger, or “ire unmerited.”.....
