The Voice (1912) by Thomas Hardy

From Poems That Make Grown Men Cry, an anthology by Anthony and Ben Holden.

The Voice (1912) 

by Thomas Hardy 

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

Traveling 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.

Seamus Heaney recommended The Voice and noted:  

I can't honestly say that I break down when I read "The Voice," but when I get to the last four lines the tear ducts do congest a bit.  The poem is one of several Thomas Hardy wrote immediately after the death of his first wife in late November 1912, hence the poignancy of his dating it December 1912. What renders the music of the poem so moving is the drag in the voice, as if there were sinkers on many of the lines. But in the final stanza, in that landscape of falling leaves, wind and thorn, and the woman calling, there is a banshee note that haunts ’long after it is heard no more’.