"The Voice" by Thomas Hardy is not a particularly complex
poem to understand, it seems to me. Understanding just a bit about Hardy's own life
will add to your understanding. The speaker, probably Hardy himself, has obviously
loved a woman with complete love. It is likely Hardy mourning the loss of his wife of
forty years, Emma. She is the one, he says, "who was all to me." He is standing out in
the open moors and believes he hears this "woman much missed" calling to him. If it is
her, he asks her to reveal herself to him:
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!
This wistfulness is a
hope that she will be restored to him in her original beauty--thus the "original
air-blue gown."
In despair, he soon understands it's
probably nothing more than the wind traveling "across the wet mead" and "oozing thin
through the thorn from norward." The last image we see of this heartbroken,
faltering man is leaves falling around him, wind oozing through the trees, and the
woman, his wife, calling. Even knowing she is forever gone, he continues to hear her
voice.
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