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Thomas Hardy Poems Notes

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Thomas Hardy Poems Notes
The Voice – Thomas Hardy Analysis Notes:
€the Voice€ Analysis
In the poem The Voice by Thomas Hardy, the speaker of the poem hears what seems to be the voice of his dead wife, Emma. He remembers with nostalgia their time together before her death and in doing so three different moments of their lives is presented: the beginning of their relationship, the latest days of it, and the present. At the beginning, their relationship was based on love, whereas as time passed, the woman changed from the one he had fallen in love with and so a loss of love occurs, which is one of the poem\'s themes. The present consists of the time after the woman has died when the speaker hears her voice, looks back at their time together and expresses a feeling of grief, regret, guilt, and loneliness. The author establishes a contrast between these particular moments through the use of several different devices.
To begin with, the first moment is mostly presented in the second stanza. Unlike the other two, this moment of the couple\'s life was positive, which is shown by the phrase when our day was fair€ on the first stanza. It implies that at one point of their relationship, at the earlier times, their days were good, due to the presence of love. On the second stanza, the voice remembers their days of courtship in which he would drive near to the town where the woman waited for him. As he implores the woman to appear to him in the same place and wearing the same attire, a sense of longing and loneliness is created. This attire is described through the vivid visual image original air-blue gown! By connecting the color blue to the color of the air, actually referring to the sky, a positive connotation is given to the memory of this first moment, emphasizing the fact that those days were full of joy and love. The existence of an exclamation in that phrase conveys a sense of excitement, related to their earliest days. In this stanza, the tone is hopeful and rigorous as the speaker

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