‘The Voice’ by Thomas Hardy.jpeg

Another poem scrawled out by me.

This time in Lamy ‘Dark Lilac’ (2016 LE ink) from a T10 cartridge in my Lamy Safari ‘All Black’ (2018 LE pen) with its ‘F’ nib.

To better understand this poem, one needs to know a little about Hardy’s relationship with his first wife, Emma, who this poem appears to be about. I won’t go in to it here, you can look it up if you’d like to.

She died in 1912, and he published this in 1917.

One can read it as an elegiac love-poem, but to me it seems more like an admission of the selfishness of human (male?) desire, coupled with an acknowledgement of his own approaching mortality.