Thomas Hardy's View: life HAPpens

It is only human to ponder the meaning of life, but to me Thomas Hardy had a much more interesting way to look at the subject.  Not that all people ponder the subject aimlessly, but within his sonnet Hap he seems to have less conviction, but more of the feeling why should we even try in life?  He even seems like it would be a breath of fresh air if he were to know that there was a vengeful god that gets kicks out of ruining human’s lives.  That there is a reason for misery and a reason that Thomas has had such a hard go with life, love and pursuit of happiness.  At least if he knew that he could deal with it and be more willing to accept his problems in life if he knew he could blame someone for it.  However, Thomas feels that there is no control over his life; there is no fate, no destiny and definitely no meaning to life.  By the way he explains everything that happens in life is absolutely by chance.  When he realizes the idea for himself it definitely is a hard hit to his morale.  He speaks of the randomness with “dicing time” as to infer the idea of gambling.  For if there is no fate, no destiny or meaning in a person’s being then they are simply rolling the dice of life to see how everything pans out.  Whatever choices the person makes within their lifetime sets them into an indefinite path of progress to nowhere. 

Thomas even speaks about those individuals that say they know the future.  The “purblind Doomsters” are saying that no matter how one may choose to progress their life it is all in vain since they will end up the exact same way that everyone else has; dead.  Whether it is natural death or a cataclysmic ending we will all have the same destination.  The only thing that I really cannot figure out what Thomas wants us to think is about how he does mention “purblind” and the fact that they enjoy discussing his own “pilgrimage as pain”.  After examining the possibilities I want to conclude that that was his last spark of hope about “the meaning of life”.  Since he calls the Doomsters half blind it shows that they do not know the whole story.  The path that they see he has taken is only within their own eyes, but not taken from a different angle.  So the Doomsters see his life as wasted, useless, and trivial where he shows us just a small amount of hope for the future from his past.  The Doomsters see his “pilgrimage as pain” or his life as just pain, but it seems that Thomas says that life it not about the destination, but it is about the journey that we take.  His hopeful attitude is based off of what he has already experienced within his own life, the choices that he has made, the relationships that he has created, and hopefully all of the memories he will have attained.  So in a much more dignified way of saying it Thomas has simply put that life is not whether you win or lose, but how you play the game.  Since in life there is no win or lose there is only death in the end, but hopefully if you could do it all over again you would choose not to hit the reset button by being content on how you lived your life. 

Porphyria: SHE'S ALIVE!!!

So I have not been able to look at other people’s blogs yet on how many chose this to blog about or what they had said, but Porphyria’s Lover is by far one of my favorites.  No, not because of the weird content, but because of the many ways a critic can pick it apart and see the meaning in so many ways.  And that is why I enjoy English Literature so much because it is on all how one perceives it since we are now unable to ask the author on what it was actually intended to mean. 

For instance after speaking to a few other classmates about the poem their initial reaction is the same as many others I have spoken to saying that the lover obviously strangled her to keep her from going back to her upper class lifestyle at home.  On top of that most of the classmates had struggled with the idea that the lover went unpunished by man or by God.  As just as many other people do I may agree with some people’s opinions and disagree with the next.  So I will try to prove how Porphyria was never killed and that her lover will have to be judged by God in the end of his life. 

So within the beginning of the poem we know that the setting is some secluded woods where the lover lives.  We know that he is not of the same social class as Porphyria when it says, “From pride, and vainer ties dissever.”  So then it moves to the point where her lover says that she worships him; at this point he feels God-like.  That is one moment where he cannot decipher between his imagination through his feelings and reality within the moment.  Then as he says, “That moment she was mine, mine, fair, perfectly pure and good,” he steps over the boundary of sanity.  It is not sanity of a criminal, but the sanity the way that pain is pleasure.  Yes, my view is that when he chokes her with her own hair it is not to kill her to keep the moment forever, but he chokes her during intercourse to keep the moment forever.  Yes, I understand that with the last parts of the poem he describes her as mostly dead, but if we take a deeper look then we can read that she is merely unconscious. 

“No pain felt she,” means that there may have been a slight moment of discomfort, but majority of the time she was enjoying because it was heightening her level of climax.  If anyone would research within the history of hangings it would show that the people that were pulled down from the gallows their corpses still had proof that they were aroused through the strangulation.  Then the lover moves to the descriptions of her eyes, “I warily oped her lids; again laughed the blue eyes without a stain.”  That means that he was very careful when opening her eyes while checking her pupil’s responsiveness and not to damage anything needed for future sight.  Then next part is looking at her eyes for any stains with blood.  When someone dies of asphyxiation the blood vessels in the eye normally explode due to lack of oxygen and the intense strain.  The next part that proves she is alive is when he loosens the hair around her neck, “her cheek once more blushed bright beneath my burning kiss.”  He is saying that as soon as he took the constriction off of her neck the blood returned to her face the way it is supposed to happen. 

Okay, it was misleading for me when he said, “Her head, which droops upon it still,” but that means that she is unconscious not dead.  So finally he can sit and think about how perfect the moment is being with her without any of the other outside pressures of family, friends or anyone else.  The two can sit and enjoy the moment . . . especially when she wakes up.  For him the moment feels that it was written as fate and that there clearly is no higher power working against them since they accomplished what they wanted.  However, they may have not had man or God interrupt their meeting, but what the lover did not put into account is the judgment the two will have to face on judgment day when after their death.  So their spirit is unclean after choosing to have premarital intercourse.

So it may not have been my initial opinion, but after doing some research and looking back through the poem it shows up as a very strong argument that Porphyria was never killed and the two lovers will eventually have to answer for their sins.