How Hardy Conveys His Emotions About His Dead Wife in His Poems 'the Going' and 'the Voice'

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How does Hardy convey his emotions about his dead wife, effectively through  “The Going” and the “The Voice”?

The death of Hardy’s wife has influenced his emotions as well as his poems; this shows the difficulty of his situation and expresses it in both poems.

In the poem “The Going” Hardy shows fury of portraying his thoughts and feelings after the death of his estranged wife, this conveys to us his sadness, guilt and regret. To achieve this, he uses affecting words, shows us of his troubles and worries and expresses his thoughts ad memories.

He tells us of his terrible loss and great sadness with such vividness, which denotes his passionate emotions, and this clearly gains much of the reader’s understanding.

Hardy shows his feelings through frustration and misery, this all sums up into a sense of guilt, like for example the caesura followed by enjambment, this is used in the poem to signify his rage at that current moment.

The first stanza has a feel of unfairness to it because of all the questions he asked, like for example the first, third and fifth stanzas begin with “why”, but the following stanzas give no answer, but instead reflect on something that the question brought up.

The first stanza: has words that contain the same vowel sound, for example in the second and third lines “dawn and “calmly” contain the same vowel sound and significantly the sound of the “d” is so isolate and it stands out, this suggests something closed up or someone left demoralized.

The third stanza: has some great contrast between two meaningful lines that signify the two themes in this poem, the “hope” and “disappointment”.

The two lines are “end of the alley of bending boughs” and “The yawning blackness of the perspective.” It is a contrast not only between his memory and the loss, not only between the hope and the disappointment, but also between a literal, lyrical language and something empty and strange.

The fourth stanza: is filled with nostalgic atmosphere, the Emma he first knew, he repeats the phrase ‘You were..”. This is a beautiful and romantic landscape: ‘swan-necked’, in all four verses, Emma has been in control of his feelings, she left without giving any hint of her purpose, she makes hardy think that he can see her in the garden, she was the one riding along the cliffs who, ‘reining nigh me, Would muse and eye me’, while he was the one just passing by.

The fifth stanza: is all about considering what might have went wrong on they’re journey, with repeating ‘did we not’, ‘did we not speak, did we not think?’ ‘Strive to seek, that time’s renewal?’ this stanza is full of verbs, full of actions they did not take, ‘speak’, ‘think’, ‘strive to seek’, ‘visit together’.