The Voice by Hardy

The poem ‘The Voice’ is written in first person where the poet himself is the speaker and as hinted from the very first word of the first line, he is addressing a woman. The first line of the poem indicates that he has written the poem with the sense of missing someone – the woman he addresses. Connecting the phrase ‘call to me, call to me’ (line 1) to the title of the poem, we can expect the poet to describe how he hears his deceased wife (for which we have strong evidence to believe to be the woman he addresses) to be calling him.
The purpose why Hardy has written this poem is to convey his grief and sorrow after his first wife’s death, especially after realizing that he has not been there for her when she’s needed him the most. The tone of the first stanza is nostalgic and he expresses his hope to hear her voice again. A sense of slight disappointment is also there, which can be noticed in lines 2-4, because ‘[she] had changed from the one that was all to [him]’.
He opens the second stanza with a question which brings in a tone of doubtfulness in himself because he wants to make sure that he is not only imagining to be hearing her voice. He then continues the line with a request for her to show herself in front of him so that he would make sure that the voice he hears is real and then goes about describing the harmonious peaceful memories from the past he has about her in lines 6-8.
In the first two stanzas he creates a visual image of his wife the way she looked like when they were both young, her wearing an ‘air-blue gown’. By describing what he remembers her by and how he would like to see her looking like again, he creates a mood of longing to bring the memory to life. The exclamation mark he has used at the end of line 8 suggests his eagerness to be able to also see and not only hear her.
The third stanza begins with an indication of self-doubt and here he reconsiders his senses to make sure if the voice that he hears is really his wife’s or he just...