Thomas Hardy is one of the world’s most renowned poets. He was an English poet who was well-known for his war poems. He typical wrote in a style that exemplified sadness and depression. A great example of his approach to poetry can be seen in his poem, “The Voice”.
Hardy wrote “The Voice” in remembrance of his wife. Many people believe that Hardy took his wife for granted and that they did not have a “healthy” marriage. He wrote it because of the guilt living inside of him that stemmed from memories of the way he treated her. Everyone has guilt, and everyone has something that they regret doing or something they wish they could go back to and start over again. In this poem, Hardy talks about how he took his wife for granted; one will notice his guilt through the following lines of “The Voice”:
“Woman much missed, how you call to me, call to me,
Saying that now you are not as you were” (Lines 1-2).
I wrote a poem that I thought would help enhance the meaning behind what I believe Hardy was writing about; I decided to title it “Reminiscing”:
Reminiscing
Oh childhood, where have you gone
It’s been awhile since I’ve seen you
We used to play out in the lawn
When the grass is green and the sky, blue
Life was much easier back then
Didn’t care about the future, just live in the present.
Kid’s always rushing to grow when
When in fact we should enjoy life, as the time we have is lent
For when we get older our time is not still
It is but a ticking clock
Soon we will have things to worry about, like bills
And there will be no time to talk.
Oh, childhood, where have you gone
How I reminisce life back then.
I wish I could have my life set, drawn.
Hope to see you soon, again.
My interpretation, of his poem, is that it was written by a man full of regret of the time he lost with his wife. In line 5 of his poem he says, “Can it be you that I hear?” She is no longer there but he can still feel her, like a spirit in the wind, he remembers her but can never get her back. She will never return and every day the memories of her call to him and force him to remember his departed wife, the woman whom he has taken for granted after realizing she is gone.
Within my poem, I wrote about childhood and how we sometimes wish we could go back to those years, but we can’t. Many times we take our childhood for granted and long to grow up but after we’ve grown up, we notice how we should have cherished our childhood; that with each circumstance that adulthood brings, memories of our childhood call back to us. But still, we can’t go back to the past. What is done is done, so the main moral concept I received from Hardy is that you should live life as if tomorrow is your last day, so do something that you won’t regret, and things that you love because once it’s gone, it can’t be taken back.
If Hardy’s moral is to live in the present, I think it makes that point by way of the negative: by crafting a poem that is unrelentingly tied to echoes of yesterday.
I like your idea to relate Hardy’s poem of lost love to the sense of lost childhood. I think there’s a strong connection there. I do wish, however–given the unique rhythms of Hardy’s poems that we discussed in class–that you would have attempted that strange rhythm, as Brittany does in her rendition of this poem.
As far as formatting is concerned, you can use a soft return (shift+return) to eliminate the extra space between lines of your poem. You can also wrap the text around the image quite easily. Finally, when referencing certain points of Hardy’s life–for future reference–do so by making more explicit reference to the Headnote. For example: “In the headnote introducing Hardy’s poems in the Norton Anthology, the authors write that…”