MONTEVERDE, ANGELINE LUISA L.

POEM INTERPRETATION

The title of the poem is The Voice, it is written by Thomas Hardy. It was first published in 1982.
The poem comprises the emotions and feelings of the poet for his deceased wife. The poetry
consists of four stanzas, each one falls under the category of quatrain since it has a four-lined
stanza. It has a coupled rhyme scheme of ABAB CDCD EFEF GHGH. Nevertheless, the rhythm
changes in the final quatrain to accentuate emotion and grief. The syntax also accompanies the
despair and the sentiment of the lyrical voice. When we look at the first stanza, the first and
second verse’s end words don’t rhyme with each other and the same goes for the following
verses. In other words, we call this an Alternate rhyme simply because it follows the pattern
ABAB CDCD and so on.
Now, let’s jump into what we call an end rhyme. An end rhyme is used to make the stanza
melodious such as, “me/me”, “were/fair”, “then/then”, “town/gown” and more based on the
poem. Nevertheless, 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 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 made up. What about the mood? or shall we say the emotions involved
in the poem, at first when I read the poem, I thought to myself that this poem is giving jolly or
happy vibes by just reading it but that’s quite the opposite of the real meaning behind this poem.
The poem’s main themes are death and loss, and memory and past. It also illustrates the beauty
of spiritual love and paints a vivid picture of his eternal love that keeps him attached to his
mistress even after her demise. Throughout the poem, he explains his intense feelings for the
woman, how much he misses her, and how her voice approaches him. Unsure about the voice, he
questions what he hears. He thinks it may just be the wind that whistles around and not the lady
he admires.
Thus, he moves ahead, leaving the voice behind, but the woman is present because she resides in
his soul. Hence, she can never depart. Imagine the things Thomas Hardy had gone through when
his wife Emma Gifford died, just the thought of losing a loved one is hard for me what more if it
really happened? In conclusion “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, but 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.