Thread: Hidden Gems
View Single Post
  #5  
Unread 04-02-2017, 08:17 AM
John Isbell John Isbell is offline
Member
 
Join Date: Mar 2017
Location: TX
Posts: 6,630
Default

Good morning, Ian,

Favorite Hardy poems. This one I like enough to copy the whole thing out. Though I believe it's pretty well-known:

The Voice

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
Traveling 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.


No comment, really. I just find this remarkably beautiful verse, with its weird rhythms. Perhaps especially the last quatrain. It all seems to step outside of time.

Cheers,
John
Reply With Quote