In "The Voice," Thomas Hardy begins the poem with a personification of the idea of the woman he is missing not as "a" woman or "the" woman but as "Woman much missed" (1). She is thus Everywoman in the context of the poem even though she is also the specific woman who is now missing from his life but who once was part of that life as a flesh-and-blood person. The poem shows a man experiencing the desolation of a loss. The woman he is missing has presumably died, for there is something ghost-like about the way he seems to hear her voice everywhere. He tries in the poem to remember the woman as she was before "you had changed from the one who was all to me" (3). In either case, the sadness felt by the speaker is palpable. It takes form in the world around him as if part of the wind.
The poem consists of four stanzas. The first introduces the situation--the woman is no longer a physical part of the speaker's life, but she still calls to him, seeming to be more like the woman he first met than the woman she would later become. Hardy universalizes his pain by the opening line, which refers not just to a specific woman but to the idea of woman:
Woman much missed, how you call to me, call to me,
Saying that now you are not as you were. . . (1-2).
In the second stanza, the speaker questions whether he really hears this woman calling to him. He cannot see her, and he asks her to appear, again in the earlier form he remembers:
Can it be you I hear? Let me view you, then,
Standing as when I drew near to the town. . . (5-6).
In stanza three, he continues musing about what it is he is hearing--if it is not the woman herself, it might be only the breeze. In the fourth stanza, the breeze and the voice of the woman are fused, and now the sense of desolation is the strongest. Also, the sense of the woman as lost forever, probably because she is dead, becomes the strongest as well as the calling voice and the insubstanti...