Hap Thomas Hardy Prepared by Marc Plamondon

An example TEI encoding document for Nipissing University DIGI 2305.

The text is taken from Representative Poetry Online: http://rpo.library.utoronto.ca/poems/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. The God of the Old Testament. An invented god of chance: a complement to the vengeful God. The final lines have the power of a couplet, but not the rhyme of a couplet. Perhaps the root word casual is more operative here than the notion of a person wounded in a war.