The Voice

In the poem The Voice, Tomas Hardy communicates the pain of loss his wife when he imagines Emma trying to communicate with him. The poem is in the first person and He is the speaker and imagining that Emma calls to him. She tells him that she is not the woman she had become after forty years of marriage, but has regained the beauty of her youth. In the text it says:

·         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.

The poem begins optimistically with a hope that Emma is really addressing Hardy. But by the end, a belief or fear that the “voice” is imaginary has replaced this hope.

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

As a conclusion we can say that Hardy missed his wife a lot, and he tries to remembered her in any way.