Poetry Friday: The Voice by Thomas Hardy

This week's Poetry Friday host is Big A little a

Thomas Hardy is better known for his novels, but he was an accomplished poet as well, and his prose was suffused with a poet's sensibilities. Here's a poem that I've always loved for the way the last stanza breaks its form as an indication of despair--both the narrator and the poem falter, can barely go on.

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.