The poem Hap seems really dark and gloomy. “Know that thy sorrow is my ecstasy” What kind of god would want his people to be in pain? The character this poem is talking of might just be angry at everything for the pain he is going through and his death. He might have regrets and he knows his life is drawing to a close so there is no time to fix his problems. “And dicing Time, for gladness casts a moan…these purblind Doomsters had as readily strown, Blisses about my pilgrimage as pain.” Throughout your life you must gamble with time, if you take things too safely, you will miss all the important things in life. If you rush through it though, you will miss things too. I think this poem is trying to tell us to find the middle of the two and try to experience enough of life. In the musical Rent, many of the characters have AIDS and they repeat this mantra “There’s only us, there’s only this, forget regret, or life is yours to miss, no other road, no other way, no day but today.”
The poem In Time of “The Breaking of Nations” talks of life and having to do the same boring thing, day after day, and year after year. It seems to be describing the working life and that at times it is just tedious repetition. “Yet this will go onward the same through Dynasties pass.” Even when the farmer dies, some one has to take over doing the fieldwork.
“I never cared for Life: Life cared for me, and hence I owed it some fidelity” is a line from Epitaph. If you travel through life not really doing too much then you will end up alone maybe living in your mother’s basement. These lines made me think of how homeless people don’t care about their lives but they are still alive and wait for others to take care of them. It seems like they don’t try to fix their problems, they just wait until the problem gets so bad, you cant turn it around.
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Jennifer,
OK comments on these various Hardy poems, but they seem pretty unfocused and haphazard. Your tendency to quote brief lines out of context, and not to quote the other lines that make up that verse sentence, tends I think to create that effect. You seem to quote a few words and then to speculate, sometimes pretty wildly, on the possible meaning, whereas if you were more thorough in providing a context for the passages the interpretation might be more convincing.
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