At an Inn

Fiction | Poem | Adult | Published in 1892

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Summary

Background

Poem Analysis

Themes

Symbols & Motifs

Literary Devices

Form and Meter

The speaker feels inner turmoil, with the poem’s structure reflecting the back and forth of the speaker’s mind. They are torn by the yearning in their heart, the conventions of their era that regard such emotions as dangerous and immoral, and their regrets over what they failed to do then and cannot do now. The poem’s formal structure suggests the mechanics of memory itself.

The poem’s form and meter reflect that back-and-forth conflict. At first read, the poem appears conventional, tidy, and predictable: five eight-line stanzas, or octets. Reinforcing that sense of convention, the poem uses a predictable rhyming scheme: ABABCDCD. Everything appears tight, clean, orderly.

However, the lines reveal tension and exploit conflict. The lines are actually irregular in their meter. The lines alternate between iambic tetrameter—lines with four, two-beat units of unstressed, then stressed beats—and iambic diameter—lines with two, two-beat units of unstressed, then stressed beats. This reflects the speaker’s tight-lipped determination not to give in to the riotous emotions that they feel and that, much later, they regret never expressing.

Enjambment

The complex emotional dynamic in the poem is between what the speaker remembers about that afternoon at the inn and how much that memory pains them now. They cannot not remember. As the closing stanza reveals, they are still desperate and aching.

Hardy uses enjambment to recreate the speaker’s emotional dilemma, their regret. Enjambment is a poetic device in which the poet deliberately avoids end punctuation to close off lines of the poem. As Vilma Raskin Porter points out, Hardy’s sense of enjambment comes from his familiarity with the dynamics of rests in a line of music (Porter, Vilma Raskin. “Poetry and the Fiddler’s Foot: Meter in Thomas Hardy’s Work.” The Musical Quarterly, 1979).

More than half of the poem’s 40 lines do not end, but rather move into the next line. Hardy largely dispenses with the conventional punctuation that might make each line a discrete unit unto itself: Commas, semi-colons, exclamation marks, or full-stop periods.

With enjambed lines, there is no pause, no respite. Rather the poem moves with a momentum of its own, simulating the speaker’s own rush of thoughts, which are largely unwanted as they cause the speaker anxiety and pain they cannot stop, about what might have been and what will never be.

The Speaker

The speaker in “At an Inn” can be defined as Hardy himself, the setting as the inn in Winchester he recalls in his letters, and the companion Henniker, an Irish novelist and poet some 20 years his junior who is also married.

That identification simplifies any analysis of the speaker. But there is more happening here. Hardy could have used the vehicle of the poem as a moment of introspective confession. But he opts to stage the memory and to use the filter of the staff’s perspective to give what is otherwise a private experience far broader implications. He never names Henniker nor provides even a slight detail of the companion’s appearance. Within the poem, the companion is never even defined by a female pronoun. In fact, Hardy even avoids using the first-person pronoun, “I.”

Rather it is “we,” a collective that refers to the relationship between the speaker and their friend as it speaks for humanity itself. This is not about Hardy. This is about love. That avoids any concession to maudlin self-pity. Rather Hardy takes his private pain over the love he never had the courage to claim and create a commentary on the elusive nature of love.