Hardy - The Voice Summary

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The Voice Summary: As in "The Haunter" Hardy imagines Emma trying to communicate with him. The poem is in the first person, and Hardy is the speaker, imagining that Emma calls to him, telling him that she is not the woman she had become after forty years of marriage, but has regained the beauty of her youth, of the time when her and Hardy's "day was fair". Imagining he can indeed hear her, Hardy implores Emma to appear to him, in the place and wearing the same attire which he associates with their early courtship. Hardy introduces, in the third stanza, the mocking fear that all he hears is the wind and that Emma's death has marked the end of her existence - which she has been "dissolved" and will be "heard no more". The lively anapaestic metre of the first three stanzas gives way, in the final stanza, to a less fluent rhythm, capturing the desolate mood of Hardy as he falters forward, while the leaves fall and the north wind blows, as Emma (if it is she) continues to call. The poem begins optimistically with a hope that Emma is really addressing Hardy but by the end this hope has been replaced by a belief that the "voice" is imaginary. Though the vigorous anapaestic metre of the poem helps convey this initial hope, it proves unwieldy for Hardy, as is evident in the clumsy third stanza, where "listlessness" is rhymed with Hardy's unfortunate coinage "wistlessness", and we find the gauche and repetitious phrase "no more again" in the stanza's final line. The themes of the poem are: * Love * Separation * Nostalgia * Loss * Self-doubt * Life
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