Comparing Hap by Thomas Hardy and The Second Coming by Yeats Essay

Comparing Hap by Thomas Hardy and The Second Coming by Yeats 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. This poem seems to typify the sense of alienation that he and other writers were experiencing at the time, as they saw their measure as marked by accelerating social and technological change and by the burden of a worldwide empire (Longman p. 2165). The poem also reveals Hardys own imperishable 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 (Longman p. 2254). The poems study theme seems to be this sense of the world being ruled by a hostile and blind fate, not by a likable idol pushing all of the buttons. This is clearly stated within the poem itself as Hardy write s If but some vengeful god would call to me / From up the sky, and gag Thou suffering thing, / Know that thy sorrow is my ecstasy, / That thy loves loss is my hates profiting / Then would I bear it, clench myself, and die, / Steeled by the sense of ire unmerited / Half-eased in that a Powerfuller than I / Had willed and meted me the tears I shed. / But not so. (Hardy, Longman p. 2255 ll. 1-9). As you can see, this poem shows that Hardy has indeed lost all faith in a benevolent God that deals out suffering and joy to his creations as he willfully deems they deserve and need. Instead of this idea of a benevolent God up preceding(prenominal) pulling all of the strings of the world and dealing out everyones personal fate, Hardy believes fate is... ...and present as a sign that the Beast is about to be born and rule the next 2000 years just like Jesus was born and resurrected to rule the last 2000 years, while Hardy just relates the evils and pain that is inflicted on man as a sign th at there is no benevolent God, but not that there is an evil God staking his claim to our lives now enstead. He leaves our fate up to mere chance and the passage of time, while Yeats leaves our fate up to the beast (also known as Satan). Works Cited Bressler, Charles E. Literary Criticism. New Jersey. assimilator Hall, 1999. Damrosch, David, et al., ed. The Longman Anthology of British Literature Vol. B. Compact ed. New York Longman - Addison Wesley Longman, 2000. Yeats, William, Butler. The Second Coming. The Longman Anthology British Literature. Ed. David Damrosch. Longman. New York. 2000. 2329.