In my imitation of Hardy’s poem “The Voice,” I attempted to imitate the weird beat that lies within his poem, as well as the idea of that which has been lost and cannot be retrieved, something that is slipping through the speaker’s fingers. Hardy’s poem hints at the time when his wife left him, and he expresses how she still haunts him. In my imitation, I focused on the loss of memories, and the fear and confusion that results from forgetting important things. The beat was difficult to keep up, and a lot of the syntax had to be inverted to accommodate for the rhythm. At the end, especially, I could not seem to reconcile the rhyme without losing the beat, or ending on what felt like a wrong note; however, this seemed to echo the strangeness of Hardy’s ending as well, how it drifts off at the end and leaves you hanging.
The Memory
Life long foregone, must you haunt me and haunt me,
Whispering regrets into each of my ears
While the world ‘round me, it dissolves and calls to me
Wandering, wistful, and never quite here.
Is it you that I miss? Reveal, then, the years
Disappearing like fog from the warmth of the air;
Why are they lost to me? Oh, how I fear
Even the moment when I am aware.
Perhaps it is merely the passing, or else is
The emptiness of the forgotten and dead;
Or maybe it may be the falling of darkness
And rattling of thoughts which echo in my head.
Great minds, having wasted,
When death is approaching,
Cannot retrieve anything which they have tasted;
Memories forever dwindling.
Also, I found a video on Youtube that almost expresses the underlying beat, and, if anyone’s interested, they can hear that reading of the poem here.
Great effort at approaching Hardy’s falling and dactylic rhythm, punctuated, as it is, by absences. I really catch the rhythm in a few of your lines, and I think struggling through that metrical pattern is one way to understand Hardy’s skill as a poet. You also mapped the Hardy’s theme nicely onto your poem, and I like how your ending echoes Hardy’s own as the metrical pattern recedes and the lines become shorter and starker.
Quick hint on formatting: you can use a soft return (shift-return) to eliminate the extra space between the lines of your poem. Also, I’m not sure why the video didn’t just appear when you linked it, but if it doesn’t show up, you can just link the word “here”–that will make it look cleaner (the URL should never be visible in a blog post).