Am I a puppet? Who's pulling the strings? Are there strings or is it a game of chance?

So...I'm going to be honest...

And--honestly--why wouldn't I? I wasn't too excited about having to do a blog for one of my classes at first. I had just hoped that I could do the readings, papers and tests and that would be the sum of work for this class. But it has been fun. I think I've really embraced blogging and putting my thoughts out here. There's a lot more freedom and I'm not afraid to put more of myself into these posts rather than just boring people with a cut and dry analysis. I do realize that it probably comes off as a cheap way of reaching my word limit but I hope that it just shows how much I enjoy this assignment.

However, this is the next honest part--and I expect you don't really care, if you're reading this you're either my professor or your a peer who's looking for a blog post to comment on to fill your comment quota--my head is not really into this blog post this week. My laptop broke last weekend and since then my productivity level has been incredibly low. So...let's get this over with--it's the only productive thing I'll be doing this weekend and it's already Sunday.

My default mode is to just look at the poems we read this last week. I tuned in and out various times throughout the week and so it makes sense that the only thing that really stuck with me and caught my attention came at the beginning of the week.

"Hap"

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 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. 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.

Does it say something about my work ethic that I always choose shorter poems? Honestly...kind of. I have a really good work ethic and it shines when the pressure is on (ergo...procrastination is key to a good grade--not really words to live by). But maybe it says more that basically I'm not a big poetry person. I'm studying Creative Writing to write fiction not poems. So I suppose I could say that my attention span for poetry is short. I don't think that's necessarily a bad thing, not all poems are epic poems so there is a great supply of shorter ones. I also think shorter poems are great at getting their point across if they only have two or three stanzas. Every word is important.

"Hap" is a sonnet written by Thomas Hardy in the year 1898. The rhyme scheme is a simple ABAB CDCD EFEFFE. The word "hap" can be taken to be a shorter version for the phrase "that which happen by chance." As we discussed in class, the poem has an "If..then..." premise that is completed with the optional "...but." This type of structure is complimented with three stanzas starting with each word. The title and "if, then, but" structure really drive home the meaning of the poem when reading into it.



A vengeful god pulls the strings of your life?
"Thou suffering thing,/Know that thy sorrow is my ecstasy,/That thy love's loss is my hate's profiting!"
Dance, Puppet, Dance...SUFFER!

In the first stanza, Hardy or the speaker mentions the idea that possibly there might be some vengeful god (not Christian God but a general deity) who basically has it out for him, controlling his life and causing him the pain and misery he experiences in his life and revels in making him suffer. If there is...see the next stanza...

In the second stanza, he then says that he'll just grin and bear until death--knowing that there is nothing he could do to change and improve his life because a higher power has control over it. How lazy! That's a kind of scapegoat isn't it? "I really wanna write the next Harry Potter but some god has it out for me and won't allow it to be published so I'll just remain a starving artist and never really apply myself. If there wasn't a vengeful god out to make me suffer, it wouldn't have been rejected by the one and only publishing company I sent it to." Obviously, not true in that instance. Everyone knows that getting published is by trial and error.

The third stanza is where Hardy completes the poem by saying that the if...then statement is not the case. Capitalizing words like Casualty, Time and Doomsters--to me, suggests the idea that there are other powers at work, in keeping with the polytheistic idea of a non-specifically-Christian God. He seems to assert that his life has been met with both sorrow and joy and a god is not responsible for the coming and going of these experiences but rather it is by happenstance, chance or "Casualty" which is neutral. "dicing Time" means that it is random and unexpected, further supporting the claim of chance having the power.

Basically, the speaker might almost prefer knowing that there was some powerful force controlling his suffering and events that cause it in his life so that he could be put at "half-ease[ed]" that it was out of his control. Rather instead, the speaker admits the likelihood of this is not very high and instead he is subject to a life of chance that would just as quickly deal him a card of happiness and joy or one of pain.

Does this all make sense or am I rambling? Like I said, I'm not completely focused. I found the poem really interesting though as it examines the idea of fate and higher powers. I'm sure it no doubt reflects many people's ideas of fate vs. free will.

photo credit: http://rogersroadrash.blogspot.com/2010_12_01_archive.html