How does the Thomas Hardy convey his feeling of loss in "The Voice"?

"The Voice" comes as one of a series of poems which
expresses Hardy's attempt to come to terms with the death of his wife and the sense of
immense grief that he feels at her loss. Interestingly, we can link these poems in with
the tone and style of the rest of Hardy's poetic work, identifying similarities in the
way that his work always seems to oscillate between hope and despair, between joy and
depression. In this poem, Hardy tries to recapture Emma's presence and existence,
imagining that he hears Emma's ghostly voice calling to him and saying that she is once
again the young woman that he courted. However, after this tantalising moment of
rapture, Hardy is plunged back into his despair and grief, thinking that it is just the
breeze taunting him.

On key way that the poem emphasises
the feeling of loss of the speaker is through the presentation of the landscape. Note
how its description enhances Hardy's emotional desolation, especially at the end of the
poem. We have returned from the attractive and inspiring picture of Emma in her
pale-blue dress back to the bleak landscape of death and
winter:

Thus
I; faltering forward,

Leaves around me
falling,

Wind oozing thin through the thorn from
norward,

And the woman
calling.

Having had the
respite that his vision has afforded him, Hardy is now left alone once more. Note how in
this final stanza the metre breaks down completely, with an increased number of
stresses. In effect the rhythm stumbles, enacting the "faltering" steps of the aged
speaker as he is forced to cope with the hopes of reunion with dead wife being
destroyed. Clearly, these lines place stress on the effects of natural change and decay,
mirroring the same processes at work in human experience as Hardy is left still with the
woman "calling" in his own mind and he is left to struggle alone, haunted and desolate,
just as the landscape is around him.