At an Inn

“At an Inn” is a variation on the love poetry of regrets. Regret has been an emotional part of love poetry since antiquity. The premise is familiar. Lovers would come to regret the expression of their fiery passion, a love that refuses to be tidy or logical, a love that may not be sanctioned by their culture, their society, their church, their families, or even their own conscience. This drives the poetry of regret. Characters, sometimes the poet, come to terms with impulsive behavior and accept a loneliness while confessing regret for having loved intemperately, unwisely.

Ever the ironist, Hardy denies his speaker the most fundamental element of the love poetry of regret. His speaker never actually does anything to regret—no assignation, no lovemaking, no rendezvous, not even a kiss. The speaker and their beloved have dinner. The speaker regrets not doing anything about his love and now stews over the reality that their one chance may have passed them by.

The opening two stanzas set up a conventional love poem: Two lovers come together in a quiet, out-of-the-way inn. The poem focuses not on either of the two lovers. The reader does not know their names, their backgrounds, or even their genders. Rather, the focus is on the inn’s waitstaff. They serve as surrogates for the reader. Like the reader, the serving staff assumes, without knowing anything about the two, that they must be lovers and that this is no casual dinner. The speaker senses this: “They warmed as they opined / Us more than friends” (Lines 5-6). The serving staff wants to believe in this encounter because they want to believe in love. The cosmos itself, “the spheres above” (Line 12), validates this need. The staff hopes that someday their own lives might touch such “bliss” (Line 15).

In Stanza 3, just as the serving staff settle down to enjoy this dramatic play of heroic love, the element of regret is introduced: “Never,” the speaker confesses, did the “love-light” (Line 19) shine between the two. The word “never” introduces the concept of time, something that love is supposed to render irrelevant. This love, the speaker confesses, didn’t happen. Everything was set. The moment would have been perfect; but the kiss that the staff (and the reader and perhaps the speaker) assumed was coming “came not” (Line 27).

Here the speaker upends conventional notions of regret over the indulgence of careless passion. They regret not ill-advised or reckless behavior, which would have violated the conventions of polite society and made the two of them outcasts, but rather they regret the opposite. They regret not upending polite social conventions, not giving in to rash behavior, not relishing a very public and ill-considered kiss. They did the right thing, but it feels now all wrong. Rather than the expression of ill-considered spontaneity, passion here “lingered numb” (Line 28)—numbness being the opposite of passion and feeling.

In the closing lines, the speaker reveals their newfound sense of irony when they beg an indifferent universe to give them one last chance. They understand that now, when the two cannot be together, they both deeply feel the need to be together. That yearning is keen now that “sea and land” (37) and even the “laws of men” (38) keep them apart. The speaker asks: Where was that urgency back in that inn when trespass was possible and love, real and eager, within their reach? Hardy’s speaker regrets what their society assures them they should not regret. They regret not giving into reckless passion. Now they struggle with the “aching” (Line 32) of knowing they regret not what they did, but rather what they failed to do. This sense of ironic tragicomedy is one shared by Modernist characters, embodied most familiarly by T. S. Eliot’s indecisive J. Alfred Prufrock of the poem “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” (1915).