The Full Text of “At an Inn”
1When we as strangers sought
2Their catering care,
3Veiled smiles bespoke their thought
4Of what we were.
5They warmed as they opined
6Us more than friends—-
7That we had all resigned
8For love's dear ends.
9And that swift sympathy
10With living love
11Which quicks the world--maybe
12The spheres above,
13Made them our ministers,
14Moved them to say,
15"Ah, God, that bliss like theirs
16Would flush our day!"
17And we were left alone
18As Love's own pair;
19Yet never the love-light shone
20Between us there!
21But that which chilled the breath
22Of afternoon,
23And palsied unto death
24The pane-fly's tune.
25The kiss their zeal foretold,
26And now deemed come,
27Came not: within his hold
28Love lingered numb.
29Why cast he on our port
30A bloom not ours?
31Why shaped us for his sport
32In after-hours?
33As we seemed we were not
34That day afar,
35And now we seem not what
36We aching are.
37O severing sea and land,
38O laws of men,
39Ere death, once let us stand
40As we stood then!
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“At an Inn” Introduction
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"At an Inn" is a poem from Thomas Hardy's first collection, Wessex Poems, published in 1898. Generally thought to be based on Hardy's own life, the poem describes a visit to an inn, during which the speaker and his female friend are mistaken for lovers—and not just any lovers, but "Love's own pair!" Looking back on the visit many years later, the speaker laments how he and this woman seemed in love back then but weren't, and how now they are in love but can't be together due to distance and the pesky fact that one (or both) of them is already married. The poem casts doubt on the idealized idea of love, suggesting that actual love is more like an anarchic prankster having fun at humanity's expense.
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“At an Inn” Summary
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We were strangers to the inn staff that day we sought out their services. The staff's barely concealed smiles gave away what they thought about us. They treated us warmly, assuming that we were lovers—thinking that we had committed everything to love's precious plans.
The inn staff had that kindness and enthusiasm that comes when people are in the presence of real, live love, the kind that makes the world more exciting and vibrant, and maybe even makes the planet turn! The idea of our love turned them into our guardian angels, and moved them to wish that God would grant them a blissful love like ours.
The people at the inn left us alone, thinking us to be love's favorite couple. But there was never actually any love between us, at least not at the time! Instead, there was that mysterious feeling that made the breath of the afternoon seem colder, and made the buzzing fly shudder and die.
The kiss that the inn staff enthusiastically predicted—and waited for—never came. We were within love's reach, yet felt nothing. Why did love give us the glow of love if it wasn't ours? Why did he toy with us that evening?
On that long-ago day, we seemed like something that we weren't. Now, we don't look like a couple even though we ache with love for each other. Even though we're separated by both the land and sea, and by society's rules, let us stand together like we stood on that day just once before we die.
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“At an Inn” Themes
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The Pain and Cruelty of Love
Thomas Hardy’s “At an Inn” shows how love, far from being the blissful force people wish for, is often random and cruel. The poem swells with sorrow and regret as the speaker recounts a visit to an inn he made many years ago with a female friend. Though the other patrons believed the pair were in love at the time, they weren’t (or, at least, they didn’t realize that they were). Now, in the poem’s present, they are in love, but can’t be together. The poem thus presents love—and the workings of the human heart—as unpredictable, irrational, and, above all, painful.
The poem contrasts the idealized love the other patrons of the inn believed the speaker and his friend felt with the actual “chill” between them at the time. This contrast suggests that the world has an oversimplified and unrealistic view of love. Everyone at the inn marvels enviously at the “love-light” they see shining between the speaker and his friend. To them, these newcomers don’t just look like lovers, but like the perfect embodiment of idealized Love itself: “Love’s own pair.”
Ironically, though, the light of love “never” really shone between the speaker and his friend while they were at the inn. Looking back through the lens of the years that have gone by, the speaker remembers not love, but a “chill” between them. The other patrons’ insistence that this couple is a perfect, shining example of love suggests that the world is eager to idealize romance; everyone wants so much to believe in the pure, simple “bliss” of love that they imagine it even where it isn’t.
But as the speaker discovers to his cost, an idealized vision of love isn’t just plain wrong: it’s painfully and ironically wrong. Beyond merely being complicated, love sometimes feels actively cruel. Later in life, the speaker realizes he does love his friend—but only after he can no longer be with her, when they’re separated by “the severing sea and land” and “the laws of men” (in other words, physical distance and marriages to other people). This realization makes his memories of the inn feel not just bitterly ironic, but like a cruel joke.
Love, like a spiteful court jester, has painted the speaker and his friend with the “bloom” (the look) of love only to deny them the chance to make it a reality, and then cartwheeled away from the scene. The poem personifies love not as a some kind cupid committed to bringing people together, but as a much more mystifying, weird, and fickle character. Love, the poem concludes, is certainly a powerful force—but one as likely to bestow “aching” pain than “bliss.”
- See where this theme is active in the poem.
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Line-by-Line Explanation & Analysis of “At an Inn”
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Lines 1-4
When we as strangers sought
Their catering care,
Veiled smiles bespoke their thought
Of what we were.The poem starts with a flashback to the time when the speaker and his companion (most likely Thomas Hardy and his friend Florence Henniker) visited an inn together many years earlier. The first stanza sets the scene, and focuses on how the couple—who aren't actually a couple—were received by the staff and patrons of this inn.
The speaker and his female friend arrive together, though the purpose of the visit is never revealed to the reader. It's worth noting that for a man to be spending this kind of alone time with a woman who wasn't his wife would have been quite unusual during the strict moral atmosphere of the Victorian era (though plenty of illicit behavior still went on!). The speaker and his companion are "strangers" to the inn, and this anonymity, on the one hand, frees them from their identities. But this freedom is only in the eyes of others; if the poem is taken as autobiographical, both Hardy and Henniker were married to other people at the time. They are momentarily free to look like a couple, but not to actually be one.
Though they are "strangers," the staff at the inn feel happy to be in the presence of what they think is pure love. They offer their "catering care" to the newcomers, the prominent hard /c/ alliteration perhaps suggesting that the people at the inn are a little overbearing! Their smiles signal the vicarious happiness the staff feel as witnesses of this love, though they try not to make it too obvious.
The word choice that describes their attempts to hide their smiles—"veiled"—ironically gestures towards the wedding veil worn by brides. But as if demonstrating that this love is an illusion, the three alliterating /w/ sounds in line 4's "what we were" are showy and gaudy. Even just in these four lines, then, the poem sets up a tension between what people think about love and how, in reality, love can play cruel and deceiving tricks—between how things seem, and how things actually are.
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Lines 5-8
They warmed as they opined
Us more than friends—-
That we had all resigned
For love's dear ends.
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Lines 9-13
And that swift sympathy
With living love
Which quicks the world--maybe
The spheres above,
Made them our ministers, -
Lines 14-16
Moved them to say,
"Ah, God, that bliss like theirs
Would flush our day!" -
Lines 17-20
And we were left alone
As Love's own pair;
Yet never the love-light shone
Between us there! -
Lines 21-24
But that which chilled the breath
Of afternoon,
And palsied unto death
The pane-fly's tune. -
Lines 25-28
The kiss their zeal foretold,
And now deemed come,
Came not: within his hold
Love lingered numb. -
Lines 29-32
Why cast he on our port
A bloom not ours?
Why shaped us for his sport
In after-hours? -
Lines 33-36
As we seemed we were not
That day afar,
And now we seem not what
We aching are. -
Lines 37-40
O severing sea and land,
O laws of men,
Ere death, once let us stand
As we stood then!
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“At an Inn” Symbols
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The Fly
Flies usually appear when something is dead and decaying, and as such are common symbols of death. The unfortunate fly that appears in the poem's third stanza reveals the intensity of the chill between the speaker and his friend once they were finally alone, away from the staff's prying eyes.
Instead of emotional warmth and attraction in this moment, there was only distance and coldness; instead of the presence of love, there was its absence. The atmosphere was so tense, so awkward, that a little fly by the window shuddered and died, its "tune," or buzzing, silenced forever.
The fly's literal death signals the symbolic death of something else: the opportunity for the speaker and his friend to be together romantically. The moment for that has passed them by.
- See where this symbol appears in the poem.
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“At an Inn” Poetic Devices & Figurative Language
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Alliteration
Alliteration appears throughout "At an Inn," filling the speaker's lines with music and emotion. The speakers feelings are quite intense—as though they've been bubbling away in a pressure cooker—and the poem's frequent alliteration evokes this intensity. Take lines 1-4:
When we as strangers sought
Their catering care,
Veiled smiles bespoke their thought
Of what we were.The alliteration starts the poem off on a bold, forceful note in terms of sound, already suggesting the speaker's longing for "what we were" (that is, for closeness with this friend). The hard /c/ "catering care" specifically hints at the eager enthusiasm of the staff at the inn, as does the later /m/ sounds of "Made them our ministers / Moved them" in lines 13-14.
"Swift sympathy" has a quick, slippery sound, while "living love" is warm and luxurious. The inn staff are keen to help the newcomers because of the love they falsely perceive, and these examples of alliteration ring hollow; they grant the poem a gentle, pleasant beauty that evokes the glow of love, but because love isn't actually there, the sonic effects are a kind of fantasy.
By contrast, note the plosive alliteration in lines 21 to 24, with its bold /b/ and /p/ sounds:
But that which chilled the breath
Of afternoon,
And palsied unto death
The pane-fly's tune.Notice how these sounds require the reader to push air out of the mouth, creating a mini version of that "chill[]" that blows between the speaker and his friend. It's a totally opposite effect from the pleasant /l/ sounds of "left," "Love," and "love-light," marking the shift from fantasy to reality.
The poem uses alliteration in the end to build to its rhetorical height. The poem ends on a strong, high note of woe-is-me, and alliteration works alongside apostrophe and repetition to make this a dramatic, heartrending moment. The sibilance of "severing sea" also subtly evokes the salty splash of the waves that keep the speaker and his now-beloved apart.
Finally, note that much of the poem's alliteration comes in pairs, almost mocking the human pair that never was (the speaker and his friend). "Strangers sought," "catering care," "swift sympathy," "living love," "love-light," "come [...] Came," "his hold," "love lingered," "severing sea," "land [...] law," :"stand [...] stood"—these are all alliterative couplings! It's like the speaker sees couples wherever he goes, and speaks them whenever he opens his mouth. Love—or the lack of it—is on his mind, expressing itself in everything he does.
- See where this poetic device appears in the poem.
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Allusion
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Apostrophe
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Consonance
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Enjambment
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Metaphor
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Personification
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Repetition
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Rhetorical Question
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Irony
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“At an Inn” Vocabulary
Select any word below to get its definition in the context of the poem. The words are listed in the order in which they appear in the poem.
- Catering
- Bespoke
- Dear Ends
- Quicks
- Spheres
- Ministers
- Flush
- Palsied
- Unto
- Pane-fly
- Zeal
- Foretold
- Cast
- Port
- Bloom
- Sport
- Severing
- Ere
Catering-
Providing service, like food, drinks, or accommodation.
- See where this vocabulary word appears in the poem.
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Form, Meter, & Rhyme Scheme of “At an Inn”
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Form
"At an Inn" is broken up into five eight-line stanzas, each featuring a steady meter and rhyme scheme (based on this rhyme scheme, the stanzas can further be broken down into pairs of quatrains). This form is relatively simple and straightforward, and thus keeps the reader's focus on the story at hand.
The poem also divides pretty neatly into two parts: the first two stanzas focus on the inn staff's response to the speaker and his friend, while the final three reveal their actual relationship to each other both during their stay at the inn and in the present. In a way, then, the first chunk of the poem deals in a fantasy and the second in reality.
When the speaker and his friend first arrive at the inn, they are received enthusiastically as an example of true love. This illusion makes up lines 1 to 18, only to get punctured by lines 19 and 20 when the speaker reveals that this "love-light" wasn't real. By the time the speaker admits his love for his companion in the poem's end, the chance for love is long gone—a fact mirrored by the poem's structure, which literally places the distant illusion of their courtship many lines above this present reality.
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Meter
The poem alternates between lines of iambic trimeter (meaning there are three iambs, feet with an unstressed-stressed syllable pattern, per line) and iambic dimeter (two iambs per line). Lines 17 and 18 show this pattern at work:
And we | were left | alone
As Love's | own pair;Iambs are a very common foot in English poetry because they sound a lot like natural speech. That said, the meter here features a fair amount of substitutions (with the speaker swapping extra syllables or feet other than iambs into lines), and this keeps things from feeling too strict or rigid.
It's also worth noting how this metrical pattern is, in essence, broken iambic pentameter (a meter with five iambs per line). Iambic pentameter is the typical meter of the sonnet, and thus probably the metrical sound most associated with love poetry. The fact it is echoed here in broken form—lines of three and then two iambs, rather than a single line of five—might subtly evoke the brokenness of the speaker's romantic life.
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Rhyme Scheme
Each stanza of "At an Inn" uses the following rhyme scheme:
ABABCDCD
As with the poem's steady meter and form, this lends the speaker's story a sense of momentum and perhaps even predictability. That predictability, in turn, might suggest how the past can't be changed; the speaker and his friend have missed the chance to be together romantically.
Also notice that the alternating rhymes here come in pairs—or, in other words, in couples. Back at the inn, the speaker and his friend had the outward appearance of a couple, but love, like some evil prankster, was just messing with them. The poem's rhyme pairs are separated (ABAB rather than AABB), and thus subtly acts out this tension between togetherness and separateness: each end-word has another word it's meant to be with, but these words are kept at a distance.
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“At an Inn” Speaker
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The speaker of "At an Inn" is generally interpreted as being the poet, Thomas Hardy, himself. The poem is thought to be based in a real-life visit to an inn with Hardy's friend Florence Henniker. That said, knowing the biographical details behind the poem aren't really necessary to getting a sense of what's going on. It's clear enough from the poem alone that the speaker is someone who feels jaded and perplexed by love, having had and lost the chance to be with the object of his affection.
It's worth noting, too, that the reader doesn't really know what the speaker's friend actually thinks about all this! The reader only knows what the speaker tells them to go on, and it's impossible to say for sure if speaker's friend really returns his feelings.
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“At an Inn” Setting
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The story told within the poem takes place on one particular day in the past when the speaker visited an inn with a female friend. The poem's first half describes how the inn staff received the "couple" as though they were on some kind of romantic tryst despite the fact that, in reality, they weren't together.
The poem's setting towards its middle reflects that reality: instead of a warm atmosphere suffused with love, the speaker and his friend actually felt a chill pass between them—representing an emotional distance, or perhaps the death of an opportunity.
The poem then ends with the speaker reflecting on this experience in the present, turning it over again and again in his mind. This jump in time underscores that the chance for the speaker and his friend—who have since fallen in love—to be together has definitively passed them by.
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Literary and Historical Context of “At an Inn”
Literary Context
"At an Inn" was first published in 1898 in Thomas Hardy's debut poetry collection, Wessex Poems and Other Verses. By this time, Hardy was 58 years old and well-known as a novelist. These poems were collected over the decades and set against the same semi-fictional backdrop as his novels: Wessex.
Hardy described Wessex as a "merely realistic dream country" situated in southern England. Inns and pubs are quintessential feature of Wessex, places for local social gathering or rest-stops for weary travelers.
The poem is presumed to be autobiographical, and one of at least two Hardy poems that refer to his relationship with Florence Henniker, a poet and novelist with aristocratic lineage. As the story goes, Hardy made sexual advances Henniker and was swiftly rejected, not least because he was married at the time! They did, however, strike up a friendship, and wrote letters to each other for many years. On one particular occasion, they met at an inn in Winchester—and, as in the poem, were mistaken for man and wife. Hardy's poem "A Broken Appointment" similarly laments a kind of missed romantic opportunity.
Historical Context
Wessex Poems, in which this poem first appeared, was published in 1898, at the tail-end of the Victorian era in Britain. This period was a time of great scientific and technological advancement, combined with a re-evaluation of society's relationship with religion. Through its empire, Britain ruled much of the globe.
While the wider context of Victorian society doesn't appear prominently in "At an Inn," its moral strictures do lurk in the background. The inn staff make an assumption guided by the social mores of the day: if a man and a woman are together, then they are probably husband and wife.
The British exceptionalism of the Victorian period—in which Britons believed their country to be special and advanced—found expression at a more local level through stringent moral codes and social etiquette. When the speaker screams in frustration against the "laws of men" in line 38, he's probably thinking about how society prevents him from being with the woman whom the inn staff mistook for his partner. Indeed, both Hardy and Henniker were married to others.
Of course, many people had affairs, and there was plenty of supposedly immoral behavior going on behind close doors. But for the Victorians, particularly the middle and upper classes, keeping up appearances was a key part of daily life.
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More “At an Inn” Resources
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External Resources
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Wessex Poems and Other Verses — Check out the full text of the collection in which "At an Inn" first appeared.
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Hardy and Henniker — Read letters between the poet and Florence Henniker, thought to have been his companion on that day at the inn.
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Heart of Thomas Hardy Documentary — Watch a BBC documentary about Hardy's life and works.
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The Poem Out Loud — Listen to a recording of "At an Inn."
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"The Old Inns of England" — Browse an illustrated history of England's inns, some over 500 years old, in this book from the early 20th century.
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LitCharts on Other Poems by Thomas Hardy
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