Comparison between Thomas Hardy's Hap and Yeats's The Second ComingThomas Hardy (1840-1928) was one of the greatest writers of the late Victorian era. One of his great works among the many 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 represent the sense of alienation that he and other writers were experiencing at the time, as they "saw their times marked by accelerating social and technological change and the weight of a world empire" (Longman p. 2165). The poem also reveals the "constant sense of a universe governed by blind or hostile destiny, a world whose landscapes are etched with the traces of its inhabitants' fleeting stories" (Longman p. 2254). The main theme of the poem seems to be this feeling of the world being governed by a hostile and blind fate, not by a benevolent God who pushes all the buttons. This is clearly stated in the poem itself as Hardy writes "If only some vengeful god would call to me / From heaven high, and laugh: 'Thou suffering thing, / Know that thy pain is my ecstasy, / That the loss of thy love is my hate profits from it!' / Then I would bear it, clench and die, / Strengthened by the sense of undeserved anger; / Half relieved that one more powerful than I / had wanted and paid me for the tears I shed. ll. 1-9).As you can see, this poem shows that Hardy has actually lost all faith in a benevolent God who doles out suffering and joy to his creations as he willingly believes they deserve and need that pulls all the strings of the world and decides everyone's personal destiny, Hardy believes that destiny is... at the center of the card... and present as a sign that the 'Beast' is about to be born and rule the next 2000 years just as Jesus was born and resurrected to rule the last 2000 years, while Hardy merely refers to the evils and pain inflicted on man as a sign that there is no benevolent God, but not that there is now an evil God who claims its claims on our lives. He leaves our fate to mere chance and the passage of time, while Yeats leaves our fate to the beast (also known as Satan). Works CitedBressler, Charles E. Literary Criticism. New Jersey. Prentice 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. Longmann. New York. 2000. 2329.