"Hap" by Thomas Hardy
“Hap” by Thomas Hardy is the first instance of tragic poetry on The Poetry Periodical. As usual, I recommend that you first read Hardy’s words, then my paraphrased version of the poem. Then, go back and read the original version of the poem.
“Hap” is about the hopeless feeling of being the victim of constant bad luck. The word “hap” means ‘luck or fortune,’ and here, Thomas Hardy decries the injustice of constantly being at the mercy of “Crass Casualty,” or misfortune.
If only there was some powerful being who was causing him to suffer, Hardy explains, he could stand it—at least then he would be “half-eased” that there was a reason for his suffering, even if it was unfair. But, no; he suffers for no other reason than mere bad luck. And this is made all the worse by the knowledge that, “These purblind Doomsters had as readily strown Blisses about my pilgrimage as pain,” or, “Happenstance could just as easily have given me happiness as pain, but here I am suffering from constant, random misfortune.”
There is perhaps no poet in the history of the world who is better than Thomas Hardy at conveying the feelings of injustice and suffering. The lines of “Hap” that make me feel particularly gutted are, “How arrives it joy lies slain, And why unblooms the best hope ever sown?” The effortless personification and metaphor in these lines make for some of the most powerful expressions of hopelessness I have ever read. Joy is “slain” by mere happenstance, and the flower of hope “unblooms” in the face of random disaster. The word “unblooms” calls to mind the image of not even a wilting, dying flower, for that would convey that there once was hope that could die, but rather the image of a beautiful flower going backwards in time to a time before it ever bloomed, never to see the light of day.
Poetry does not and should not merely convey the heights of joy and passion. To leave out the lowest, most sorrowful moments of human experience from poetry would be to lose the most passionate form of poetry there is, and it would also be to ignore the truth of what it is to be human. Tragic poetry, by taking the experience of tragedy and distilling it into a condensed form, gives us the gift of humanity. It evokes feelings we typically hide and affirms them, thereby helping us to imbue our own experiences—no matter how miserable—with meaning.
“Hap” is about the pain of meaningless suffering. But through it, we find meaning—in our own pain, in our understanding of the pain of others, and in the reflection of our life experiences.
**Which lines of “Hap” do you find most jarring, painful, gutting, or otherwise memorable? I’d love to hear from you in the comments below.