Beci Carver on Thomas Hardy ("The Voice")

Close Readings: Episode 11

I talked with the brilliant Beci Carver about “The Voice,” one of Thomas Hardy’s great poems of mourning for his wife Emma. You can find our conversation on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and Google Podcasts.

It’s a beautiful poem, a haunting, haunted poem. Hardy wrote it in December 1912. Emma had died just a month before, and it’s clear from the poem (and from much else) that Hardy, by then 72 years old, was profoundly affected by her death.

But this was a complicated loss, as Beci outlines for us at the beginning of the episode. By the time of her death, Hardy’s marriage with Emma had withered. Already by the time he wrote “The Voice,” Hardy had remarried Florence Dugdale, a woman many decades younger. In fact, Florence had been living with the Hardys even before Emma’s death—a situation that Beci describes as “awkward.” No doubt it was!

Grief can be complicated in any number of ways; here, perhaps, it’s inflected by feelings of guilt and even of resentment. There’s a fantasy here of having Emma come back to him transformed—and transformed in at least two ways: alive as opposed to dead, of course, but also as the version of the woman with whom he’d once been happy, not the woman from whom he’d already, well before her death, become estranged. And then there’s the additional complication, as Beci points out, that Hardy knew that it would be Florence, and not Emma, who would read the poem.

And yet Beci wants us to read this first of all as a love poem—and not as an elegy. Here’s where the conversation got really interesting. I asked her if she thought it even was an elegy, fundamentally. Here is how she answered:

No, I have this theory that all of his elegies are written against the elegy form and that they refuse to reconcile themselves to the fact of death, or to the fact of absence. Not only is she not gone, she’s capable of being revived, revived as she was when they were still in love. And so there’s this kind of wonderful refusal of reality in it. But it’s a kind of refusal of reality which is made possible by every poem in keeping a voice alive. You know, poetry keeps things immortal, so if you’re not going to bring someone to life in a poem where can you?

What I wanted to know was how seriously we should take this idea, the perhaps familiar idea that poetry confers a kind of immortality, a kind of posthumous existence. What would it mean for Hardy to believe this, I mean really to believe it? What kind of transformation of Emma would it require to feel her presence after her death, or what must we understand about what Emma had become to Hardy before her death to think that her presence as “voice” counts as real presence at all?

Beci tells us that Hardy felt a kind of freedom in writing poetry, partly because he had already established himself, by the time he began to publish poetry, as a successful novelist. This conversation helped me see how beautiful—and also how strange—his enjoyment of that freedom could feel.

Beci Carver is a lecturer in 20th-century literature at University of Exeter and the author of Granular Modernism (Oxford UP, 2014). Her articles have appeared in journals like Textual Practice, Critical Quarterly, Modernism/modernity, and Essays in Criticism. She is also very close to completing her second monograph, Modernism's Whims, which I await eagerly. You can follow Beci on Twitter.

Once again, you can find our conversation on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and Google Podcasts. Please follow the podcast, and leave a rating or review if you like what you hear. Share an episode with a friend. And stay tuned for more soon!