Themes and message

The main themes of the poem “The Voice” by Thomas Hardy are reality versus imagination, death and the past.

Reality versus Imagination

As you have seen, the speaker has a hard time determining whether the voice he hears is real or not. At first, he is convinced his wife is calling him, but as he analyses the voice and the sounds around him, he starts to doubt that this call is real. He wonders whether this voice is not a hallucination he created based on the sounds of wind:

“Or is it only the breeze, in its listlessness
Travelling across the wet mead to me here,
You being ever consigned to wan wistlessness,
Heard no more again far or near?” (ll. 9-12)

Until the very end of the poem, the speaker remains confused and we cannot say whether this voice is really a mystic presence of his dead wife or only something the...