The Voice Themes

Sure, "The Voice" is about death, grief, love, ghosts, but the crux of the poem is the speaker's experience with reality. What is real in this poem? What is unreal? Is there an actual voice in the...

Death is hanging over this poem like a big ol' Harry Potter-style Dementor, sucking any shred of joy or happiness out of it. The speaker spends the whole poem wallowing in grief—both for the deat...

"The Voice" has a pretty complicated relationship to the past, probably because there are multiple "pasts" in the poem. There's the distant past, in which the woman was "all" to the speaker (i.e.,...