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,
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...

The subtlety of the versification is extraordinary, from the urgency of the opening line to the see-saw grammatical complexity of the next three, which force the reader to ravel out, as the speaker himself is doing, the wavering flow and recoil of the fractured relationship between the two lovers. All of which brings in its tow the speaker's recollection of something that appears at first to be descriptive merely — though in that line, in that single, astonishing phrase ("Even to the original air-blue gown"), the poet has once more recreated the intensity and evanescence of the relationship they had shared. Air-blue? In that place, at that moment in the poem, the line is masterful, and I would never trust the ear or sensibility of anyone who thought it merely just another instance of Hardy's proneness to strange locutions. 

That poem, entitled simply "The Voice", is surely one of the better-known among the long sequence of memorial poems Hardy wrote after the death of his first wife. It goes on for a further two stanzas, with the last of these following a different rhythm and rhyme-scheme to those preceding it. Yet the note of distress in the six syllables of the last line of the poem (which reads simply, "And the woman calling") does more than repeat in compressed form the first line of the poem; it leaves the speaker with no way out of his loss. The woman's voice, and with it the sense of his own failure, will accompany him wherever he goes. However, to indicate in the briefest possible compass the range of tones to be heard in Hardy's verse, I will offer a remarkably short, witty poem which is hardly known at all, but which will, I hope, add some weight to my remark about "the steel" that is seldom entirely absent from his verse. This little poem is simply yet mysteriously called "Waiting Both":

A star looks down at me,
And says, ‘Here I and you
Stand, each in his degree: 
What do you mean to do, —
          Mean to do?'

I say: ‘For all I know,
Wait, and let Time go by,
Till my change come.'-‘Just so,'
The star says. ‘So mean I: —
                So mean I.'