[R. S. Gwynn]

This came up for discussion in the Hardy seminar at West Chester. I was wondering what you'd make of its meter, given the fact that the final stanza is an anomaly.


151. 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, 5
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, 10
You being ever consigned to existlessness,
Heard no more again far or near?

Thus I; faltering forward,
Leaves around me falling,
Wind oozing thin through the thorn from norward 15
And the woman calling.

[Roger Slater]

Actually, I think the meter breaks down in S3L4. Until then, it was basically dactyllic tetrameter, no?

[S. A. Wyatt]

Interesting poem. Here is my best guess:

In the first three stanzas, the predominant meter is dactylic tetrameter with L2 being catalectic (having the final unstressed syllables lopped off).

L4 of each stanza and the final stanza all seem free verse with rhyme to me. What is interesting is that L4 of S1 almost scans as a catalectic line with a dropped unstressed syllable, but the L4 in each subsequent stanza seems to deviate further from that norm until we get to the total collapse in the final stanza.

I would need to read this a few more times, but the collapse of meter seems to mirror the collapse of the N's state of mind by the end of the poem.

Regards,

Sean


Sorry, Roger, your post was not there when I started to reply - I am just slow on the draw. Glad to see we are mostly in agreement.

[Chris Childers]

Surely the issue is not identifying the meter, but what to make of it? There is no free verse here. Dactylic tetrameter for three lines, fine, and the fourth line in each of the first three stanzas shifts to a more iambic tetrameter. Then the last stanza has two trochaic trimeters, another dactylic tetrameter, and finally either a trochaic trimeter or a dimeter, depending on whether you want to stress that "and" (I prefer not to, though probably we should).

The shift from the longer, faster lines to the slow, deliberate short lines is abrupt, like a blast of cold wind in the face, and marks a transition (perhaps) from a lyrical, nostalgic yearning for what cannot be to the poet's bitter, halting steps taken in the real present. It is a terrific poem, in the full sense(s) of that word.

[R. S. Gwynn]

Even to the original air-blue gown!

This is one on which I argued about the scansion. Hardy, like many poets of his day, may have given one syllable to "Even," one syllable to the y-glide elision between "the" and "or-," and two syllables to "air" with a diphthong. So the line, which was reported as chaotic, may be fairly regular D4 catalectic.

E'EN to th'or / IGinal / A-yur-blue / GOWN

Perhaps our Brit friends can enlighten us here. I know that Hardy spoke with a distinct regional accent, but I don't think that there are any recordings of him reading or speaking--a great shame.

As the poem continues, the meter becomes more logaoedic with the admission of trochees that can't be expanded, as far as I see, with diphthongs.

I would scan the final stanza like this:

Thus I; faltering forward, T3 (with syncope on "falt-ring")
Leaves around me falling, T3
Wind oozing thin through the thorn from norward /uu /uu /u /u (unless "thorun" is possible)
And the woman calling. uu/ u/u

These mixed meters strike me as strange for Hardy, though he often mixes iambs and anapests ("Neutral Tones").

[R. S. Gwynn]

I often wonder if something could be done in these meters:

http://baltimoreauthors.ubalt.edu/wr...dneylanier.htm

[R. S. Gwynn]

This is quite lovely and may be apropos:

http://www.poetryarchive.org/poetrya...do?poemId=7068

[Chris Childers]

The recording didn't work for me--I'll try again later, but the de la Mare is very nice; thanks for it.

Re: the Hardy poem, I don't think you need a diphthong on "air," though I guess it's possible--my grandmother might use one. I think the slow, almost spondaic end to line 8 starts to prepare us for the decelerations, as it were, into duple meter that happen again in line 12 and then in the last stanza. It's the same thing in line 15--I would not force a diphthong into thorn but just regard that line as a kind of metrical microcosm of the whole poem. The metrical as well as sonic effect is helped by the sonorous assonance, thORN from NORward.

[R. S. Gwynn]

True enough, but I suspect many Brits pronounce "air" as two syllables, just as many southerners do.

[Gregory Dowling]

The footnotes to the Collected Poems tell us that "air-blue gown" was originally (in the manuscript) "hat and gown", which seems to work against the two-syllable reading of "air". However, the notes also tell us that the opening line in the manuscript was "O woman weird" (instead of "Woman much missed"), which suggests that he hadn't yet firmly established the metre.

By the way, Hardy also later revised "consigned to existlessness" to "dissolved to wan wistlessness" (which is how it appears in the Collected).

The last stanza also has lines 1, 2 and 4 indented (unlike any of the other lines).

It is an amazing poem. I think F. R. Leavis was one of the first to pay close attention to it, in New Bearings in English Poetry (1932).