The Voice Analysis

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.

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The poem has an optimistic opening in which Hardy hears Emma's voice, and there is hope. The rhythm in the first stanza is also steady and ongoing which adds to the hope.
In the second stanza, Hughes is desperate to be with his wife again. He is eager to be with her as he used to in their firts few years of love. His desperation is obivous, as he clearly remembers the exact shade of her gown. The beat here is also continuous, showing that he is full content when he is with her or when he thinks she is around.
In the third stanza, Hughes realises that she is gone and with her death, her existance ended. He uses the words 'dissolve' and 'no more' which show that she is leaving him and his hope now turns into fear. The siblance slows things down in this stanza as he realises that she isn't there anymore. Also, the siblance brings a haunting effect to the poem as now Emma will always be in his memory and the fact that Hughes did not take care of her before her death when she was ill will remain with him forever.
His use of the question mark (?) show that he is confused and he doubts his sanity due to the guilt of neglecting her.
In the last stanza, he says that he is struggling to move forward and he feels like the world has come to an end but the leaves are falling off trees, proving him worng. He knows now that he will have to move on, but is not yet ready. The use of alliteration with the 'th' sound slow down the rhythm and show his struggle.
The last line, "And the woman calling" brings us back to the beggining and to the same conclusion, that he can hear her. This shows the cycle of life, that we will always end up where we begin. Sometimes we are happy and at otehr tiems we will go thorugh hardships, but they won't last forever, we will eventually move on. He hears her voice again, after the doubt showing that he knows he has to move on, but is not ready just yet.

| Posted on 2009-10-13 | by a guest

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Commentary on ‘The Voice’ by Thomas Hardy
‘The Voice’ by Thomas Hardy seems to be about the speaker’s feeling of pain and the overwhelming nostalgia that he feels regarding the loss of his lover. He imagines that she is returning to him as he repeats the phrase ‘how you call to me’, and states that she is ‘much missed’, indicating his needs to see her. In the middle of the poem, there is hope and nostalgia ‘Can it be you that I hear?’ but the speaker soon loses his hopefulness. Near the end of the poem, the speaker feels defeated as the quote ‘Leaves around me falling’ hints and we sense the spirit of the woman fading out. As we read the poem, we realise that it was someone very close to him in the past, perhaps his wife, Emma Lavinia Gifford, once beautiful and young but now older and larger. He might have wrote this poem out of guilt after his wife died because he wasn’t supporting her at the time. The metaphorical message of this poem might be that humans tend to find isolation hard to deal with.
In the first stanza, the poet is mourning about the physical change of his lover and towards the end of it, he looks back in time when the ‘day was fair’. In the passage ‘woman much missed’ the poet uses the word ‘woman’ to describe his dear lover. It is a distant, materialistic word which makes us feel that poet doesn’t truly love her. When the poet states ‘now you are not as you were’ and ‘when you had changed from the one who was all to me’ it shows that the poet longs for the past and he implies that this elderly woman was not the one he fell in love with at first. This could also mean that she must not reveal herself if she is not as she looked in the past. When the speaker says ‘when our day was fair’ he could be referring to when his lover was beautiful or when it was fair for him that he had an attractive woman.
When the poet asks ‘ Can it be you that I hear?’ it shows us his longing for her but when he states ‘let me view you’ we realise he only wants to see her initial beauty. He the progresses to daydream as he says ‘Standing as when I drew near to the town where you would wait for me’ and ‘as I knew you then’ yearning for his submissive youthful lover. The phrase ‘Even to the original air blue gown!’ refers to the girl when she used to be originally beautiful and fresh as the word ‘air-blue’ implies. All the points above demonstrate that he loves this woman in a shallow way, desiring only the good looks of her young self.
When the poet says ‘Or is it only the breeze in its listlessness’ he begins to doubt about her presence but he secretly hopes that it is her, wondering freely like the wind, ignoring him. The ‘wet mead’ might represent his feelings, wet because of his tears. The poet uses words like ‘dissolve’ and ‘heard no more again’ to describe the breeze, which he thinks is his lover’s spirit and this shows us that the lover might be dead.
The words ‘faltering forwards’ means that he is struggling to move onwards, he feels that the world is coming to an end as the sentence ‘leaves around me falling’ convey a sense of death and sadness. The passage ‘wind oozing thin through the thorn from norward’ might refer to the spirit of the lover coming from the skies, maybe paradise, and gush through him, the thorn. He calls himself a thorn because it symbolises pain and exclusion. The breeze or wind symbolises his lover which can easily come and go away. The last sentence ‘and the woman calling’ evokes a sense of loneliness as if it were the last time he will ever hear her again.
Structure & Mood
The Poem starts off with a steady rhythm and fairly optimistic but as the poem progresses it become nostalgic and full of despair:
• In the first stanza, the poet is mourning about the physical change of his lover and towards the end of it, he looks back in time when the ‘day was fair’. The rhythm is steady and ongoing which adds hope to the reader.
• The second stanza is full of hope and nostalgia as he thinks back to the old days. He believes Emma is trying to talk to communicate with him. The rhythm is also steady because he is thinking about nice memories and it is nearly story like. The sentence ‘even to the original air blue gown’ stands out because the rhythm does not fit in with the rest of the poem
• In this third stanza, he begins to feel less confident and hopeful and he uses a lot of natural imagery to convey this. The rhythm slows down a bit as he realises she is gone. The words ‘listlessness’ and ‘wistlessness’ call each other and create a sense of sibilance, as if the presence is haunting him.
• In the last stanza, the poet has given up and he is depressed because he feels he will never see his woman again. This stanza has a cut rhythm like staggering and it is fading away with the spirit. The alliteration in this stanza also slows down the tempo. It seems like the poet has realized that the voice is imaginary and has to move forwards but he is finding it difficult. This stanza is much shorter than the others and it is combined with short sharp sentences and long phrases to create chaos and emphasise the speaker’s misery.

| Posted on 2009-10-02 | by a guest

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THE VOICE
The poem “The Voice” describes the encounter of a person with the “spirit” of a woman. As we read the poem it is quite clear that the woman and the persona where very close in the past. He is not scared of her presence but instead he is in a way criticizing her about her past when they where together. As you read the poem you can¢t be sure if the persona is actually talking to someone or to himself. He feels that he wants to redeem himself from something that he has done in the past and now regrets and here that woman is the “angel of his salvation”. In the poem the persona expresses his grieve in depth and he demonstrates this with his use of language which in this case is alliteration, metaphor and occasionally repetition. In addition, we see that the persona is somehow unable to prevail over his grief and to go on with his life. In the end we feel the presence of the woman fading out, possibly suggesting that she will never return and the persona will just be left with her memories. The whole poem connects to the writer¢s personal life. Thomas Hardy¢s wife was one of the fairest of the area and came from a wealthy family but as the years went by, his wife¢s beauty was replaced by age signs and extra weight something which bothered Hardy a lot. They never got a divorce but their marriage bondage stopped functioning. When she died, surprisingly, Hardy was shocked. After her loss, most of the time Hardy was sorrowful, depressed and he wouldn¢t stop grieving. The poem is most likely dedicated to her and the reason for that is most of the time in the poem he is telling the woman how nice she was when she was attractive and that he doesn¢t want her to reveal herself if she is not as she was in the past “Let me view you, then, standing as when I drew near to the town where you would wait for me”.
The themes and ideas of the poem are many and various but they all lead to some central and main themes and ideas. I suppose that the poem really focuses on the persona¢s misery, guilt, grief and denial. We can spot all this “theme emotions” through his grief and pain which is stated by repetition here “…you call to me, call to me” which implies his need to look at the woman who is hypothetically calling him. Furthermore Through alliteration, “Woman much missed” which emphasizes the depth of his grief. He is also very doubtful throughout the poem which shows the persona¢s insecure personality. He is not particularly frightened by the supernatural “element” around him, he is just cautious and rather anxious, “Can it be you that I hear”, and we can see in the persona¢s voice that he states this with hesitation as if he hopes that she is there but doesn¢t dare believe it. Throughout the poem the persona¢s attitude towards the woman is moderately apathetic with a fairly strong sense of bitterness which possibly originates from his resentment and sorrow. However, as we continue to read the persona slowly is shifting his state of mind. Still he is listless towards her but now other feelings such as remorse and guilt alter his behavior towards himself, as if he is trying to adjust his personality according to his life right now. In the last stanza I assume that the fact that the persona acknowledges his emotional collapse “faltering forward, leaves around me falling” forms a feeling of hope and an opportunity to rise up from his ashes and rebirth into a new life were the woman¢s voice would be elapsed and gone forever.

| Posted on 2009-09-21 | by a guest

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i dont know who wrote the pseudo-analysis but paraphrasing is not analysisng, it is useful when trying to get the meaning of the poem, however this overview just goes around the bushes and lacks seriousness even at the time of saying who was the poet who wrote it.

| Posted on 2009-05-27 | by a guest

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i really appreciated the summary it really helped me thank you and ignore the criticsms, it was extremely helpful

| Posted on 2009-05-19 | by a guest

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this analysis is not worth anything, I'm sorry to whoever wrote this. First of all it's Hardy, not Hughes, and second of all don't state the obvious, people aren't that stupid

| Posted on 2009-05-08 | by a guest

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Many thanks to the person who wrote the summary !
Please keep writing them for different poems and stories :)
I got at A+ !
Thankyou :)

| Posted on 2009-02-25 | by a guest

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Anonymus - Detailed overview
The Voice is one of the extra ordinary group of poems written between 1912 and 1913.
Thomas Hardy wrote this poem after the death of his wife Emma, to alliveate the pain, guilt and depression and to reveal his feeling of loss and emptiness.
The poem has an optimistic opening in which Hardy hears Emma's voice, and there is hope. The rhythm in the first stanza is also steady and ongoing which adds to the hope.
In the second stanza, Hughes is desperate to be with his wife again. He is eager to be with her as he used to in their firts few years of love. His desperation is obivous, as he clearly remembers the exact shade of her gown. The beat here is also continuous, showing that he is full content when he is with her or when he thinks she is around.
In the third stanza, Hughes realises that she is gone and with her death, her existance ended. He uses the words 'dissolve' and 'no more' which show that she is leaving him and his hope now turns into fear. The siblance slows things down in this stanza as he realises that she isn't there anymore. Also, the siblance brings a haunting effect to the poem as now Emma will always be in his memory and the fact that Hughes did not take care of her before her death when she was ill will remain with him forever.
His use of the question mark (?) show that he is confused and he doubts his sanity due to the guilt of neglecting her.
In the last stanza, he says that he is struggling to move forward and he feels like the world has come to an end but the leaves are falling off trees, proving him worng. He knows now that he will have to move on, but is not yet ready. The use of alliteration with the 'th' sound slow down the rhythm and show his struggle.
The last line, "And the woman calling" brings us back to the beggining and to the same conclusion, that he can hear her. This shows the cycle of life, that we will always end up where we begin. Sometimes we are happy and at otehr tiems we will go thorugh hardships, but they won't last forever, we will eventually move on. He hears her voice again, after the doubt showing that he knows he has to move on, but is not ready just yet.

| Posted on 2008-12-28 | by a guest