This one is amazing. Hardy had a horribly unhappy marriage, but when his
wife died, he mourned her, in actuality and poetry, deeply and
incessantly. This poem captures all of that -- the mourning, the
acknowledgement of the problems, the memory of first love.
Hardy's innovations in rhyme and meter are always a delight, too.
I came to Hardy's poetry late, after not liking his novels much when I
read them in my youth. The discovery is one of the great joys of my
middle age.
Max Richards wrote:
> Thomas Hardy : 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.
>
>
--
Tad Richards
http://www.opus40.org/tadrichards/
http://opusforty.blogspot.com/
The moral is this: in American verse,
The better you are, the pay is worse.
--Corey Ford
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