The Voice

This study guide will help you analyse the poem “The Voice” by Thomas Hardy. We will show you examples of elements in the text that will be relevant for your analysis. In these notes, we will focus on composition, characters and narrator, language and style, rhythm and rhyme, imagery and metaphors, theme and message and perspectives.

Presentation of the poem

Title: “The Voice”
Author: Thomas Hardy
Published in: Poems of 1912-13
Date of Publication: 1914
Genre: Poem

Thomas Hardy was a British writer. He is mostly famous for his poems, but also for his novels, like “Far From the Madding Crowd” or “Tess of the d’Urbervilles”. “The Voice” is part of a collection inspired by the death of his first wife, Emma Gifford.

Excerpt

Below, you can read an excerpt from our study guide:

Symbols

The wind is obviously symbolic in the poem. It is symbol of both the past and the future, a symbol of change. On the one hand, the wind is representative of the speaker’s soul. On the other hand, it can be a way his dead wife makes her voice heard. Notice the way the wind takes also the form of a soft breeze:

Or is it only the breeze, in its listlessness
Travelling across the wet mead to me here (ll. 9-10)

And:

Wind oozing thin through the thorn from norward, (l. 15)

Lastly, the motif of the calling is the...