Hardy’s relationship with Emma was deeply troubled. Thomas Hardy wrote “The Voice” in response to the death of his wife, Emma Gifford, in November of 1912. Yet in the last moment he once again hears, now separate from the sound of the wind, the voice of the woman calling once again. He stumbles forward into a bleak autumnal world where the leaves are falling and a cold north wind makes its way through the hostile, thorny landscape. Thus, in the fourth stanza, the speaker seems to re-encounter the world as it is. His love is gone, “dissolved” into the ignorance of death, never to be heard from again. In the third stanza, the speaker begins to see through his own daydreams, to acknowledge that what he hears is not the call of his love, but the breeze traveling mournfully over the meadows. He remembers seeing her waiting for him outside the town where he would come to visit, and that she would wear a beautiful blue dress in those first days. He thus imagines seeing her, once again not as she was when she died, but as she was when they first met.
In the second stanza, he allows himself to look at the world as though the woman he misses really is calling out to her. The speaker imagines her voice telling him that she has returned to the way she was when she was young. We learn that man looks back most fondly at the beginning of their relationship, when they were young and their “day was fair,” or easy and joyous. In the first stanza, he imagines that he hears her voice calling to him. “The Voice” is written from the perspective of a man who yearns for a woman who is no longer in his life.
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