Analysis

Composition

When analysing poems like “The Voice” by Thomas Hardy, you should look at both outer composition (stanzas, verses, graphical expression) and inner composition (beginning, subdivision, course).

Outer composition

“The Voice” is comprised of four stanzas, each with four lines/verses. This type of stanza is also called quatrain.

The lines vary in length, the fourth stanza  having the fewest words. The verses rhyme alternately following the scheme abab. However, the rhymes are not always perfect. Sometimes, they are created using the same words, or the words have imperfect rhyme:

“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.” (ll. 1-4)

Inner composition

The poem is narrated by an unnamed speaker and is addressed to the spirit of his dead wife. It is a poem of grief, which includes some elements of mysticism.

• In the first stanza, the speaker calls upon his lost wife, whom he imagines calling him. He imagines his wife telling him about the happy distant past and he contrasts it with more recent and less happy memories.
• In the second stanza, the speaker asks the woman to show herself in a blue dress, to prove that she is not only a hallucination of his mind.
• In the third stanza, the speaker questions himself. Is the voice only a figment of his imagination, a sound illusion created by the wind?
• In the fourth stanza, the sound of falling leaves and of the wind surround the speaker, who remains questioning whether the voice is real or not.

Characters and speaker

In “The Voice” by Thomas Hardy, two characters are present: the speaker and the image/ghost of his dead wife, symbolised by a voice he seems to hear. In fact, the poem is addressed to this woman, whom the speaker loved and is now gone.

The unnamed speaker was very attached to his wife and has not managed to make peace with her death. For this reason, he is under the impression that he hears her: “WOMAN much missed, how you call to me, call to me,” (l. 1)

Though he is aware that their relationship had deteriorated in the recent past, the speaker wants to focus on the good memories of th...