In 1862, Thomas Hardy, then 22, first arrived in London from the rural Outback of Dorset along Britain’s southern coast. A formal university education was beyond his family’s means, and he came to the city to apprentice as an architect. He was certain that the comforting structures of his family’s Christian faith were eroding. In architecture, Hardy found the reassurance that humanity could design and create order independently of God, thus refusing to surrender the universe to chaos and blind chance. 

As he began to doubt even his faith in architecture, Hardy, always a voracious reader, pursued poetry as a sideline. He published several limited-run chapbooks before turning to novels, hoping that novels might ensure a better income. He created realistic settings that drew on his childhood in Dorset and characters who reflected his sympathies for the harsh life of England’s working class. His vision was at once tragic and comic, sentimental and ironic. Hardy published a series of what became landmark works, most notably Far from the Madding Crowd (1864), The Return of the Native (1878), The Mayor of Casterbridge (1886), Tess of the D’Urbervilles (1891), and Jude the Obscure (1895).

As Hardy’s worldview grew more pessimistic and his characters more amoral, Victorian readers soured on his darkening vision. Happily, Hardy returned to poetry. Over the next decade, Hardy published several collections in which he experimented with stanza forms, blank verse, and point of view. “At an Inn” appeared originally in Hardy’s first collection, 1898’s Wessex Poems. Hardy’s decade-long experimentations with verse reached its creative pinnacle with the publication of The Dynasts (1910), a three-volume drama in verse set amid the rise of Napoleon, a towering achievement for which Hardy was knighted.

After his wife of nearly 40 years died in 1912, Hardy, himself nearing 70, remarried and began an entirely new stage of remarkable productivity centering on the publication of six collections of new verse. Hardy was perennially shortlisted for the Nobel Prize although his works were not in keeping with the Prize’s expressed criteria for recognizing literature that offered an idealistic vision of humanity. With his death at age 87 in 1928, Hardy was hailed as the most respected British writer of his generation. He was given the country’s highest recognition: His ashes were interred in Poets’ Corner in Westminster Abbey along with, among others, Geoffrey Chaucer; Ben Jonson; Alfred, Lord Tennyson; and Charles Dickens. Ever the ironist, ever the sentimentalist, Hardy instructed that his heart be buried separately, back home in Dorset.

Poem text

WHEN we as strangers sought  

  Their catering care, 

Veiled smiles bespoke their thought 

  Of what we were. 

They warmed as they opined 

  Us more than friends— 

That we had all resigned  

  For love's dear ends.  

And that swift sympathy 

  With living love 

Which quicks the world—maybe 

  The spheres above, 

Made them our ministers, 

  Moved them to say, 

“Ah, God, that bliss like theirs 

  Would flush our day!“ 

And we were left alone 

  As Love's own pair; 

Yet never the love-light shone 

  Between us there! 

But that which chilled the breath 

  Of afternoon, 

And palsied unto death 

  The pane-fly's tune. 

The kiss their zeal foretold, 

  And now deemed come,  

Came not: within his hold  

  Love lingered numb. 

Why cast he on our port  

  A bloom not ours?  

Why shaped us for his sport 

  In after-hours? 

As we seemed we were not 

  That day afar, 

And now we seem not what 

  We aching are. 

O severing sea and land,

  O laws of men,  

Ere death, once let us stand 

  As we stood then!  

Hardy, Thomas. “At an Inn.” 1898. All Poetry.

Summary

Two people, presumably a man and a woman although they are never given names or assigned pronouns, arrive at a country inn for dinner or perhaps for an even longer stay. They are not regulars at the inn, rather they are “strangers” (Line 1). The serving crew, assuming the two are lovers or at least “more than friends” (Line 6), are especially solicitous. The staff offers the couple “swift sympathy” (Line 9). The staff exchange “veiled smiles” (Line 3) that reveal their shared assumption. Here surely are two lovers, maybe meeting secretly, clandestinely. The couple’s “living love” (Line 10) suddenly, unexpectedly makes the inn itself a different, better place. The inn is charged with the sweet energy of these two lovers. In offering the couple special “catering care” (Line 2), the staff hopes that somehow, someday, their lives might be graced with “bliss like theirs” (Line 15). After the couple has been served, the staff leaves them alone, gifts them with privacy.

In Stanza 3, the speaker interrupts this romantic scene to correct the misconceptions of the serving staff. Some time has passed. The speaker is now looking back on that visit with keen regret. The speaker acknowledges that the two diners were hardly “Love’s own pair” (Line 18). In fact, the speaker concedes there had been no “love-light” (Line 19) between the two of them. Rather, despite the romantic setting and the abundant opportunity to express love, the two during their dinner had maintained their uncomplicated and very polite friendship. It was, the speaker notes, a chilly distance, an emotional coldness so profound that—and the speaker ironically exaggerates here—the chill could easily have killed the flies buzzing on the windows of the inn (Lines 23-24).

The speaker recalls that the kiss that the staff apparently assumed they would exchange had never come. Their resistance to expressing any emotion disturbs the speaker. Ironically, now that they are separated by time and by distance, their emotions have gotten stronger. Ironically, they are the lovers the inn staff had mistakenly thought they were. But they cannot do what they could have so easily done then: Enjoy love’s sweet kiss.

The speaker asks why “Love” (Line 18) (the word is now capitalized) would have orchestrated such a romantic moment only to deny the couple. Bitterly, the speaker thinks Love was playing with them, making sport of their feelings, their refusal, or their inability to take advantage of the moment and express their love: “Why shaped us for his sport / In after-hours” (Lines 23-24).

In the closing stanza, from the perspective of retrospect, the speaker cannot help but note the irony. There they were, at the same table, in the same inn, but unable to make a move, paralyzed emotionally. The speaker hints that “laws of men” (Line 29) stood between them, suggesting perhaps one or both were already married, thus making any expression of their love at best problematic. Now, separated (or “severed”) by “sea and land” (Line 37), they both ache to express their love. The speaker entreats whatever forces run the universe—fate or love or nature or God—to give the two of them one more chance before they die, in short to give them a do-over. Just “once,” he entreats, “let us stand / As we stood then” (Lines 39-40).

There is desperation in the closing lines. The speaker hopes without foundation that the two of them might someday come back together as they were back at the inn and that this time, they would not be so timid, so afraid of their powerful and urgent feelings.