The Voice

The subject matter in this poem is obvious from the opening line “Woman much missed, how you call to me, call to me,”
which confirms Thomas Hardy’s love, and the loss he feels over the death of his wife. Hardy chose not to write blatantly
about his late wife; instead, he indirectly channels his feelings to the reader through a soldier during the Great War of
1914, during which this poem was written, and about the soldiers mourning for his partner. These two themes, love and
loss, reoccur regularly throughout the poem. “…When you had changed form the one was all to me, but as at first when
our day was fair.” Complimenting these themes is desperation, which is shown as the poet describes a voice that he cannot
possibly be hearing but through his need for her at this time of great fear, he does.

Typical to the Victorian era which focused on death, the mood is daunting and often unsettling, broken only by a brief
flicker of pleasure in the second stanza as Hardy reminisces back to the lovers first meeting. “…Let me view you then,
standing as when I drew near to the town where you would wait for me.” Lines like this are perhaps what made Thomas
Hardy’s poetry stand out the most. Though he approaches death with the same contempt and sadness as the many others
did, his approach to the afterlife is one of temptation. Death uses the woman to constantly lure the soldier with promises to
hear her voice and see her face. The afterlife becomes, no longer intimidating, but inviting, blissful, a place of content
where a person has all he needs and wants. Which would have been a comforting though amidst the horrors of WWI.

Hardy’s use of Quatrain stanzas, teamed with an A, B and A, B rhyming pattern gives the poem an even outcome and is
very affective in most stanzas, but then in others, it is abandoned for the more natural speech like result. When the two of
these are blended together it sounds almost disturbing. The speech like movement is adopted at two points, the first, when
the soldier gets excited at the prospect of seeing his wife again, as when they first met, and the second is towards the end,
when he submits to the voices and dies. “Thus I; faltering forward, leaves around me falling,”

In the third stanza, the soldier starts to question the authenticity of the voice. Thomas Hardy uses a mixture of alliteration
and assonance to aid him with these lines.

“Or is it only the breeze, in its listlessness

Travelling across the wet mead to me here.
You being ever dissolved to wan wistlessness…”

Through the first line, the reader can almost hear for themselves the sound of the breeze, put together with the whistling
affect of the complimenting third line, the reader can now identify with the soldier the voice he has been hearing and its
soft gentle quality that is so alluring. Though they are just two words, the impact is impressive. Between these two lines,
Hardy uses assonance and the harsher sounds of the ‘er and me’s to convey to the reader the man’s cynicism.

Undoubtedly the most dramatic stanza is the last, in particular the line “ Wind oozing thin, through the thorn from
norward” which tells us so much, in so few words. The writer uses onomatopoeia to describe the flow of blood and also
perhaps life, out of the mans body. He also uses symbolism keeping to the less gory matter of trees and breeze, by
referring to the blood as “wind”. He once again uses alliteration with the words “Thin through the thorn from norward”.
The “th” sound is soft and weak, expressing to the reader the overall feeling of the hopelessness felt by the poems subject.
Hardy refers to the wind coming from the north, and since most of the battles were fought in France or Germany, the wind
would have been coming down from around England.

After reading this poem once, it seems rather straight forward, however, an in-depth analysis uncovers the hidden theme
of war. Through Hardy’s skilful use of alliteration, assonance, symbolism and onomatopoeia, he successfully conveys to
the reader the soldiers desperation and pain.