All 8 Uses
hapless
in
How to Read Literature Like a Professor
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- For one thing, it has neither a thee nor a thou in sight, not an e'er nor an o'er, so we eliminate some of that ball of confusion that older poetry slings at hapless modern readers.†
Chpt 4
- The most poor Prufrock could aspire to would be Bernardo and Marcellus, the guards who first see the ghost of Hamlet's father, or possibly Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, the hapless courtiers used by both sides and ultimately sent unknowing to their own executions.†
Chpt 6
- This is not an age of tragic grandeur, Prufrock suggests, but an age of hapless ditherers.†
Chpt 6 *
- Yes, but we recall that Hamlet is himself a hapless ditherer, and it's only circumstance that saves him from his own haplessness and confers on him something noble and tragic.†
Chpt 6
- Yes, but we recall that Hamlet is himself a hapless ditherer, and it's only circumstance that saves him from his own haplessness and confers on him something noble and tragic.†
Chpt 6
- Hardy doesn't call it that, but he has great fun describing, in his ironic and detached tone, the rain lashing down on hapless wayfarers, forcing them to seek shelter where they can; hence the appearance of our three gentlemen callers.†
Chpt 10
- We never know what the old man is, and speculation among the townspeople is hilarious as well as occasionally bizarre (his green eyes suggest to one character that he's a Norwegian sailor), but his hapless, shabby appearance and long-suffering silence clearly benefit the family in a nearly miraculous fashion.†
Chpt 15
- Without our ingrained expectations about roads, however, none of this works: our hapless duo become nothing more than two guys stranded in desolate country.†
Chpt 26
Definitions:
-
(1)
(hapless) unlucky or unfortunate -- often making others feel pity
- (2) (meaning too rare to warrant focus)