Hap by: Thomas Hardy

This poem is talking about the chances that he is faced with. It’s a 14 lines’ sonnet that has three stanzas. Throughout the poem, the use of contrast words gives audiences a strong feeling of the author’s intolerant suffering. “Love” and “hate”, “sorrow” and “ecstasy”, “joy” and “slain”, “sun” and “rain” all contrast the hardship of sorrow. Thomas says if there is a God, is it his “profiting” to make me suffer so much? He states his question in the first stanza. The contrast that he uses is to emphasize the torture and how much he has lost.
Thomas uses images “sun”, “rain”, “sky” to describe the stuff that he can’t reach and uses rain to compare as “suffering”. The metaphor “readily strown” is used to express the ignorance of the God.
The three stanzas shift the tone in the third stanza. The word ‘but” symbolizes the transition of the poem. In the previous lines, the poet is going to accept the reality. He says if it is God who wants to make him suffer, he would bear it until death. Yet, he starts to question himself again “why do all the bad things happen to him?” “Why does God put me into this situation?” The rhetorical question” why unblooms the best hope even shown?” gives a vivid sense of suffering. “Unbloom” is used for the action to ruin someone’s hope. In the end, Thomas states that “my pilgrimage is like this, a very painful life.” It shows the Thomas’s saddens that he can’t find any path to ease his pain and suffering.



Hap Thoma Hardy

IF but some vengeful god would call to me
From up the sky, and laugh: "Thou suffering thing,
Know that thy sorrow is my ecstasy,That thy love's loss is my hate's profiting!"

Then would I bear, and clench myself, and die,
Steeled by the sense of ire unmerited;
Half-eased, too, that a Powerfuller than I
Had willed and meted me the tears I shed.

But not so. How arrives it joy lies slain,
And why unblooms the best hope ever sown?
--Crass Casualty obstructs the sun and rain,
And dicing Time for gladness casts a moan....
These purblind Doomsters had as readily strown
Blisses about my pilgrimage as pain.