Can it be you that I hear?

Abstract

Love can do strange things, especially to those of a poetic persuasion. Unrequited or otherwise, it can invoke emotional turmoil, obsessiveness and an overactive imagination on the part of the lover concerning the object of their affection. Such a depth of romantic feeling led a lovelorn Thomas Hardy to experience a series of aural apparitions, which he mistakenly understood to be his estranged wife Emma, in his poem 'The Voice' (1914). Echoing an idealized past and reverberating with a guilt-ridden and bittersweet present, this autobiographical work concerns Hardy's remembrance of that 'woman much missed', as he imagines her calling to him. In the first half of the poem, Hardy (2005 [1914]: 1160) hallucinates: 'how you call to me, call to me, / […] Can it be you that I hear?' The imagined voice of Emmapromising the romance of their early days together in Boscastledoes not last for long. In a bitter moment of self-awareness, Hardy (2005 [1914]: 1160) asks: 'Or is it only the breeze, in its listlessness[?]' It might have sounded like Emma, but the rustling of the trees proved empty, listless. This temporal shift between the past and the presentwistful nostalgia and bitter disappointmentinvokes two different voices: an auditory ghost of Emma drawn from a psychological and emotional yearning, and an ecological voicethe rushing breeze coursing through the trees. Tellingly, the poem's last lines read: 'Wind oozing thin through the thorn from norward, norward / And the woman calling' (Hardy 2005 [1914]: 1160). Hardy knows it