Poem: The Voice

    I have a couple of books waiting to be blogged about but no time to do them justice. So meanwhile here is a poem I like -- as I'm sure you know, this is one of the ones Hardy wrote after the death of his first wife Emma. The marriage had deteriorated badly and he was in love with someone else, who he married after Emma's death, but when he had lost her he started to remember the happiness of the beginning of their relationship and wrote several of these sad and lovely poems, of which this is probably my favorite.

   Thomas Hardy : The Voice

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.

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!

Or is it only the breeze, in its listlessness
Travelling across the wet mead to me here,
You being ever dissolved to wan wistlessness,
Heard no more again far or near?

Thus I; faltering forward,
Leaves around me falling,
Wind oozing thin through the thorn from norward,
And the woman calling. 

					Thomas Hardy (1840-1928)	1912