"The Voice"

Woman much missed, how you call to me, call to me,
Saying that now you are not as you were
When you had changed from the one who was all to me,
But as at first, when our day was fair.

Can it be you that I hear? Let me view you, then,
Standing as when I drew near to the town
Where you would wait for me: yes, as I knew you then,
Even to the original air-blue gown!

Or is it only the breeze, in its listlessness
Travelling across the wet mead to me here,
You being ever dissolved to wan wistlessness,
Heard no more again far or near?

      Thus I; faltering forward,
       Leaves around me falling,
Wind oozing thin through the thorn from norward,
      And the woman calling.

Commentary by A. Banerjee, Emeritus Professor of English and American Literature, Kobe College, Japan

In this poignant love lyric about his dead wife, Emma Gifford, Hardy imagines that she, whom he has much missed, has reappeared in spirit and is calling him. He seems only to hear her "voice," and longs to "see" her as she was when he first met her, evidently in summer-time, when she wore an "air-blue gown." But he realizes that he is merely dreaming and imagining her presence. The third stanza brings him the realization that the "voice" was perhaps no more than a breeze blowing across the wet meadows where he is standing, and that the woman herself has dissolved into "wan wistlessness," or oblivion. In an early version of the poem, Hardy had coined the word "existlessness" for her present state.

What Robert Langbaum characterises as a "timeless, placeless auditory experience" (289) passes quickly. In the last stanza, there is a sudden change in metre from the dancing rhythm of the earlier lines to a more austere music, as the poet finds himself forlorn in an autumnal landscape. This is marked by falling leaves, and swept by winds blowing "northward" — no longer a breeze but chilly gusts from the north, suggesting the very opposite of summer, indeed, the death of the year. Langbaum is not alone in suggesting that the "break in symmetry" here establishes this poem as a "major" one in Hardy's oeuvre (290; Langbaum here concurs with the poet Donald Davie's assessment of it).

The change of "existlessness" to "wistlessness," with its appropriate echo of "wistfulness," was not the only refinement that Hardy made. Claire Tomalin notes that in the first draft of the poem, the speaker addressed the presence he experienced as "O woman weird" (xv), which might remind us of the "sisters weird" in Macbeth, who deliver tempting greetings to the hero that lead to his downfall. The sinister note is duly avoided in the final version , and the memory becomes softer, the benign nature of its ghostliness better suggested by the "air-blue gown" (itself substituted for the "hat and gown" of the first draft). In other words, "The Voice" was carefully crafted to express the poet's memory of feelings, retrieved and indeed made keener after bereavement, for the partner of what had turned out to be an unhappy marriage.

In the end, however, this typically Hardyesque poem sensitively evokes memories of past joy only to intensify the speaker's present sense of hopelessness, and almost despair, about the loss of the woman he once loved.

Related Material

Bibliography

Langbaum, Robert. "The Issue of Hardy's Poetry." In An Historical Evaluation of Thomas Hardy's Poetry. Ed. A. Banerjee. Lewiston: Edwin Mellen, 2000. 286-302.

Tomalin, Claire. Introduction. Unexpected elegies: Poems of 1912-13, and other poems about Emma. New York: Persea Books, 2010. ix-xx.

Created 2 October 2024