"The Voice" is one of Hardy's poems written out of guilt due to his relationship with his wife that is now dead. The speaker imagines Emma, his wife, to be trying to communicate with him, and thus implores her to appear to him in person as she was used to, wearing the same clothes. One of the techniques that is used is repetition: "call to me, call to me". This captures the longing of the speaker whilst at the same time producing an echo that suggests that he is imagining his dead wife's voice in the sound of the wind. this despair is captured in the third stanza when the speaker begins to fear that his wife is truly dead and "dissolved" and will be "heard no more". Hardy uses a lively and regular anapaestic metre in the third three stanzas which is replaced by a more broken metre in the final stanza, thus enacting the speakers own stumbling steps as he "falters forwards" into his continued life without his wife, haunted by her voice and the possibility of her presence.
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