Summary
“The Voice” is written from the perspective of a man who yearns for a woman who is no longer in his life. In the first stanza, he imagines that he hears her voice calling to him. We learn that man looks back most fondly at the beginning of their relationship, when they were young and their “day was fair,” or easy and joyous. The speaker imagines her voice telling him that she has returned to the way she was when she was young.
In the second stanza, he allows himself to look at the world as though the woman he misses really is calling out to her. He thus imagines seeing her, once again not as she was when she died, but as she was when they first met. He remembers seeing her waiting for him outside the town where he would come to visit, and that she would wear a beautiful blue dress in those first days.
In the third stanza, the speaker begins to see through his own daydreams, to acknowledge that what he hears is not the call of his love, but the breeze traveling mournfully over the meadows. His love is gone, “dissolved” into the ignorance of death, never to be heard from again.
Thus, in the fourth stanza, the speaker seems to re-encounter the world as it is. He stumbles forward into a bleak autumnal world where the leaves are falling and a cold north wind makes its way through the hostile, thorny landscape. Yet in the last moment he once again hears, now separate from the sound of the wind, the voice of the woman calling once again.
Analysis
Thomas Hardy wrote “The Voice” in response to the death of his wife, Emma Gifford, in November of 1912. Hardy’s relationship with Emma was deeply troubled. The two fell in love and married despite the disapproval of both of their families. Yet their passion began to give way to unhappiness from the beginnings of their marriage, as Hardy was preoccupied with his work even on their honeymoon, while Emma could be immature and frivolous. By the time of her death, the two were almost entirely estranged. They lived separate lives on the same estate, and Hardy had begun wooing his secretary, Florence Dugdale, who was 39 years his junior. The two married almost immediately after Emma’s death.
Despite this troubled relationship and its cold end, Emma proved a greater influence on Hardy’s poetry after her death than when she was alive. Between 1912 and 1913, Hardy wrote more than he ever had before, all about Emma. The poems, often considered Hardy’s best poetry, deal not just with grief, but with his regret over his neglect of his wife, and the profound contrast between their relationship in their youth and when she died. “The Voice” embodies these complex and conflicting thematic concerns, beautifully expressing the many emotions inherent to loss, as well as the specific troubles of Hardy’s difficult first marriage.
The sonic structure of “The Voice” relies heavily on repetition. Hardy introduces this motif in the first line, with the repetition of “call to me, call to me” (1). By repeating “call to me,” the poem suggests a kind of echo, as though her calls literally reverberate through the poem. At the same time, this repetition subtly destabilizes the meaning of the first stanza. If the line was merely “Woman much missed, how you call to me,” it would merely refer, in yearning tones, to the call of a woman. The doubling instead suggests almost a command, as though the poet is imploring his lost wife to call to him, even as he listens to her already calling.
This doubled portrayal of the woman’s call lends “The Voice” its profoundly uncanny poetic structure. The first three stanzas seem to establish that the speaker hears a haunting breeze, but imagines it as his wife’s voice. Then Hardy turns the whole poem on its head with the last two lines, “Wind oozing thin through the thorn from norward,/ And the woman calling” (15-16). Rather than portraying the sound as either the woman’s voice or the sound of the wind, as in the third stanza, where the speaker asks, “or is it only the breeze,” here both sounds coexist, layered on top of one another (9). Here, the two “call to me”s in the first line reveal themselves as indeed not mere repetition, but perhaps two separate phrases. There is the call within the breeze, and there is another call that exists even after the speaker recognizes the first call as only the wind.
Repetition also influences Hardy’s use of rhyme in “The Voice.” The four stanzas follow a simple ABAB rhyme scheme, with the “A” lines composed of six iambs, and the “B” lines five. However, this summary of the structure does not reveal one of its anomalies, the use of “multiple rhymes,” or the rhyming of multiple syllables, or even multiple words. In “The Voice,” the “A” lines always use these multiple rhymes: “call to me” with “all to me,” “view you, then” with “knew you then,” “listlessness” with “wistlessness,” and “forward” with “norward.” In the beginning of the poem, these lengthy rhymes use simple vocabulary, and feel utterly natural to the poem. Here, they serve to reiterate the poem’s echoing aesthetic, its focus on repetition and call and response.
However, in the third stanza, these rhymes become more strained. “Listlessness” is less evocative than unnecessarily wordy. Even when Hardy employs complex or antiquated language in his poetry, he tends to employ words in their simple forms, without many suffixes and prefixes. In general, poets tend to treat each syllable as valuable, and to try to focus their language into words with the most power to enrich the imagery and themes of the poem as efficiently as possible. In this case, Hardy rhymes the unwieldy “listlessness” with “wistlessness,” a word he actually made up. Rather than one unfortunate word allowing him to use another more evocative word, the poet strangely inserts a pair of rhymes which say basically nothing. By deviating so strongly from these poetic mores, not just of poets in general but of his own work and even of the first two stanzas of this poem, we can assume that Hardy isn’t failing to think of more natural sounding rhymes, but rather making a point about language.
The third stanza of “The Voice” seems to resolve the quandary at the heart of the poem. It establishes that the woman’s voice the poet seems to hear is merely the sound of the wind, that she will be “heard no more again far or near.” The unconvincing rhymes which Hardy employs here suggest that this simple approach to loss, in which the woman who has died really has gone, is also somehow unconvincing or unnatural. The third stanza offers a kind of false ending to the poem, an unsatisfying conclusion which resolves the uncanny call of the dead as merely part of the bleak natural world. The beautiful rhyme between “falling” and “calling” in the fourth stanza neatly contrasts with the “listlessness” of the wind. Paradoxically, the only satisfying conclusion for the poem is one which leaves the ambiguity of what the speaker hears, and whether or not the dead woman is still calling, permanently ambiguous.
Many of Hardy’s poems explore metapoetic themes, or questions about poetry itself, along with their more explicit subject matter. This is true of “The Darkling Thrush,” which invokes the death of poetic history as part of the death of the nineteenth century, and of “Afterwards,” which depicts a profoundly literary protagonist through its focus on observation as a defining human feature. “The Voice” is similarly conscious of language and poetry, in conjunction with its more obvious interest in loss and grief.
The title, which literally refers to the voice of the woman, also implicitly suggests poetic voice. The shifts in voice within the poem, from simple language to unwieldy or even invented words, constructs an unstable voice for the speaker, as well as the woman. “The Voice” is a lyric poem, or a brief poem written in the first person which focuses on the personal and emotional experiences of the speaker. Yet the poem conforms to this genre almost against its will. The speaker’s mournful call, “Thus I,” both emphasizes his presence as a solitary figure, and suggests a desire not to be alone, to be with the woman he misses. The instability of Hardy’s poetic voice points to a desire to escape the lyric poem in favor of a more conversational mode, an escape which is impossible because the object of the speaker’s desire is utterly gone to him, not just because she is dead, but because he only misses her as she was when she was young.
