The Voice

“The Voice” “Woman”

• derogatory?

• impersonal

• universalises the experience perhaps

• cold and detached

Meter “Woman much missed, how you call to me, call to me,/ Saying that now you are not as you were”

• first 2 lines - dactyls

• stuttering and unsure

• conveys yearning

• emphasises the key words - “woman … missed .. call … call”

“call to me, call to me … all to me”

• Echoing effect with the triple rhyme

• presenting the woman as ghost like perhaps

“our day was fair” “original air-blue gown!” “wet mead” “leaves around me falling”

• seasons changing

• suggesting time is passing with lethargy

“Standing as when I drew near to the town”

“standing”

• subservient, passivity

“drew”

• double meaning

• suggesting effort vs her passivity

• presenting the speaker as the architect

• completing the reconstruction of Emma

“Even to the original air-blue gown!”

“air blue”

• unsubstantial - from memory - creating an idealised version of her/ romanticised version

• diaphanous - translucent

• ethereal - ghost-like even when supposedly living

“the breeze, in its listlessness”

• connecting Emma to the air and the wind - the air as freeing, stressing the ubiquity of Emma’s presence and perhaps her haunting qualities

• suggests it is lacking energy or enthusiasm - so does Emma as an extension

“listlessness …. wistlessness”

• link the breeze and the voice through rhyme

• sibilance actively personifying the wind

wistlessness

• suggests her memory is reduced to his sadness

• neologism

“Heard no more again far or near?”

• question

• pleading tone

• stressing desperation and the speakers unsettled mind

“Thus I; faltering forward”

• uneasy

• Unsure

“Leaves around me falling”

• Marking time passing? Or perhaps the fragility of nature

• Suggesting that time is passing but he is stagnant - stuck in the past -left stagnant in his grief

“Wind oozing thin through the thon from norward”

Oozing

• uncomfortable - tactylising - thick and fluid wind

Oozing thin through

• paradoxical

• Confusing

• Placing us in the speakers unsettled mind

Thorn

• Harshness, hostility of the setting

Norward

• north wind

• Bleak, cold, desolate atmosphere

• Mirroring the speakers grief

• Lethargy

“And the woman calling.”

• ambiguity to the ending

Extended metaphor of the voice

• extended metaphor for Orpheus and Eurydice -heightening the romance the tragic doomed love story