Classic Poem of the Month

The current Classic Poem of the Month is Thomas Hardy's 'The Voice' and was chosen by Noel Williams.

 

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

 

I met this poem thirty years ago, and it’s stayed with me. I found it hard to read without getting caught up in the emotion, especially when reading aloud. It had a powerful effect on me, perhaps more than it might readily suggest – though I’ve always felt stories of lost love a little difficult to take.

Recently, I went back to Hardy, and found I was nowhere near as excited by his work as I used to be. Although it’s not difficult to admire what he is trying to do in many of his poems, the poems themselves can seem quite dated, forced and artificial to a modern ear. Too many concessions to the force of regular forms. Too many contractions and inversions to make the verse work.

But “The Voice” still works for me, and I still know why. It’s because Hardy’s technical mastery connects with his emotional intent – are we allowed to talk about intention these days or not, I forget? – so that he’s able to exercise masterly control of form to convey loss and despair which, in a sentimental situation, and with, to some extent, a sentimental voice, he’s able to achieve both intimacy and distance, allowing us to experience his sense of loss and also to distance ourselves from it. It’s the technical mastery as much as the emotional force that I admire.

The poem works by a progressive shift in viewpoint. In stanza 1, we hear the woman, a real woman, hearing with the ears of the protagonist. In stanza 2, the protagonist doubts what he hears. The reader, having only that info to go on, has to question it, too. Stanza 3 places us now on the (apparently empty) moor, hearing, probably, only the wind, not a real voice at all.

Each of these stanzas, in the use of repetition and feminine rhyme, on antepenultimate syllables in lines 1,3, 5, 7, 9, 11 gives us a sonorous, fading echo as in “call to me/all to me”, identical phrases with the first consonant – guess what? - lost. Though my favourite is “listlessness/wistlessness”, which we might class as a Victorian/Georgian excess, (especially “wan”, which I guess a modern poet would only use with irony), but which for me connotes the fading of voice or wind or vision, especially in the neologism “wistlessness”, which we might not perhaps notice in reading, but which I think is a brilliant little device. In form it’s the opposite of “wistfulness”, yet we read it as identical in meaning. What else could it mean? When you think about it, wistfulness doesn’t really have an opposite. So the word is at one and the same time meaningful and a negation of its own meaning: an exact image of the shifting uncertainty of the whole poem, both in sound and meaning. That, for me, is a quintessentially modern word play, (even though I’ve a suspicion that Hardy may have coined it simply to get the rhyme)

But he reserves the best trick for the last stanza, and it’s this which for a very long time kept Hardy in my head as a master to emulate.

Stanza 4 simply does a completely different thing from the other three stanzas. Although it retains the ABAB rhyme scheme, now the A lines have feminine rhyme on the penultimate stanza, and the B lines do the same. In all other respects the stanza is different in form from the preceding three: metrically, rhythmically, syllabically. Why? Well, obviously, there is a further shift in viewpoint here. Now we are outside the speaker’s head, seeing him as an object on the moor. There’s little doubt in the last stanza that this is an external, objective viewpoint. We have zoomed right out from the subjective certainty of stanza 1 through two stanzas of increasing doubt to the subjective certainty of the speaker’s delusion.

And, whilst we still have a rhythm which evokes the events described, it’s a rather different rhythm from the echoing singsong of the wind: it’s the plodding footsteps of the bowed man faltering forward against the wind. All lines in all four stanzas have four main stresses. But in the early stanzas there are typically eight unstressed syllables surrounding them. Lines 13 and 14 pare away all this excess: four heavy plods are barely softened.

The effect is to slow the whole thing down. Plod, plod, ploddity plodplod / Plod plodit plod plodit. Against this heavy rhythm L 15, which though it conforms to the corresponding rhythms of the previous stanzas seems somehow to hold us up, in again the long passage of the wind, all sorts of assonance and alliteration setting up more echoes for us to hear, creating, for me at least, a tension, an anticipation, which then falls into the final line. And that final line actually has virtually nothing to say, merely a repetition of the poem in summary. It is the only line limited to two stresses, and these therefore take all the force of ending. They seem somehow more stressed because so stripped. So a simple, almost banal statement, acquires huge emotion, all the uncertainties, desires, loss, despair, accumulate in those last two words.

This almost filmic shift of perspective, coupled with the willingness to mess around with form to achieve a particular purpose; the use of neologism for complex impact; the way phonic effects carry both mood and meaning; the ability to deliver a powerful poem in an essentially simple vocabulary; and above all the success of the poem in conveying the speaker’s unresolvable conflict between desire to hear what he knows is not there and despair in recognising the futility of that very desire, these combine to make this poem a model for me of how a poet might achieve something more affecting than the clever exercise of technique or the simple capture of a moment of concrete experience.

— Noel Williams

 

 

 

 

 

Archive of Classic Poem of the Month

Emily Dickinson's 341 and 754 (chosen by Wendy Klein)

Ben Jonson's 'On My First Son' (chosen by Jonathan Davidson)

Excerpt from Andrew Marvell's 'Upon Appleton House' (chosen by Simon Currie)

Shelley's 'Remorse' (chosen by Paul Nash)

 

Submit your own classic poem

Choose your favourite 'classic poem' (i.e. more than 70 years old), and submit it to us here along with a sentence or two about why it means so much to you. We'll select a different one each month and publish it here.

If your poem is selected, we will send you a free POETRY BUSINESS PENCIL!

 

 

See here for this week's Poem of the Day.

See here for this month's From the Archives of The North.

Fill in your email address below to receive all three direct to your inbox: