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ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Thomas Hardy
Thomas Hardy
Thomas Hardy, the son of a stonemason, was born in Dorsetshire, England,...
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FURTHER READING
Poems about Voice
Hearing your words and not a word among them (Sonnet XXXVI)
by Edna St. Vincent Millay
If My Voice Is Not Reaching You
by Afzal Ahmed Syed
Lift Every Voice and Sing
by James Weldon Johnson
Meeting at Night
by Robert Browning
On Silence
by R. Zamora Linmark
Silences
by John Montague
Speedway
by Cedar Sigo
The Keeper's Voice
by Mike Carson
The Little Mute Boy
by Federico García Lorca
The Man Whose Voice Has Been Taken From His Throat
by Naomi Shihab Nye
Time
by Chris Martin
Voices
by Sharon Olds
Related Prose
To Go Its Way in Tears: Poems of Grief
by Edward Hirsch
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The Voice

 
by Thomas Hardy

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.







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