The Voice

Thomas Hardy (1840-1928)

The Voice

1Woman much missed, how you call to me, call to me,

2Saying that now you are not as you were

3When you had changed from the one who was all to me,

4But as at first, when our day was fair.

5Can it be you that I hear? Let me view you, then,

6Standing as when I drew near to the town

7Where you would wait for me: yes, as I knew you then,

8Even to the original air-blue gown!

9Or is it only the breeze, in its listlessness

10Travelling across the wet mead to me here,

11You being ever dissolved to wan wistlessness,

12Heard no more again far or near?

13Thus I; faltering forward,

14Leaves around me falling,

15Wind oozing thin through the thorn from norward,

16And the woman calling.

Notes

1] On Thomas Hardy's first wife. The 1914 edition has the date "December 1912." at the end of the poem.

10] mead: meadow.

11] dissolved to wan wistlessness: "consigned to existlessness" in 1914.

15] norward,: "norward" in 1914.

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Online text copyright © 2008, Ian Lancashire for the Department of English, University of Toronto.
Published by the Web Development Group, Information Technology Services, University of Toronto Libraries.

Original text: Collected Poems of Thomas Hardy (London: Macmillan and Co., 1932): 325-26. PR 4741 F32 Robarts Library.
First publication date: 1915
Publication date note: Satires of Circumstance, Lyrics and Reveries with Miscellaneous Pieces (London: Macmillan, 1915): 109. PR 4750 S3 1914 Robarts Library
RPO poem editor: Ian Lancashire
RP edition: RPO 1998.
Recent editing: 2:2002/2/13

Composition date: December 1912
Rhyme: abab