Explain the poem "The Voice" with full details."The voice" by Thomas Hardy.

Of course, probably whole dissertations have been
written about this poem, so I will just give you an overall summary of this poem to help
you examine it in greater details by yourself. You have picked one of my favourite Hardy
poems to look at and analyse! This poem is part of a sequence of poetry that remembers
his marriage to Emma and his love for her. It is one of many elegies that he wrote after
her death as he tries to come to terms with his grief and the loss of
her.

This poem thus begins with Hardy hearing Emma's voice
calling him, saying that she has reverted to her earlier self which he loved so much.
However, the poem raises serious doubts about whether it is really her or not. Hardy
says he wants to see her as she was in Cornwall in the earliest days of their courtship.
But already he has lost his confidence in her reality. Perhaps it was just the sound of
the breeze. Emma is gone forever and he is a desolate old man. In my opinion, this is
one of the bleakest poems in the sequence of elegies. The last stanza, from my
perspective, is incredibly masterful as we are left with the picture of a grief stricken
old man trying to move on, both physically and emotionally, in his
life:

Thus I;
faltering forward,

Leaves around me
falling,

Wind oozing thin through the thorn from
norward,

And the woman
calling.

We are left with a
picture of a man haunted by the possibility of hearing his dead wife and trying to press
on with great difficulty. Note the alliteration that gives this stanza its structure in
"faltering forward" and "falling" and then "thin through the thorn" which present a very
bleak picture. The poem ends where it began - with the tantalising yet haunting voice of
his love on the wind and the speaker of the poem struggling to live with the loss of his
wife.