17 pages • 34 minutes read
At an Inn
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Symbols & Motifs
The George Inn
If biography is trusted, the inn recreated in the opening two stanzas was the George Inn, an out-of-the-way establishment in rural Winchester, an hour’s train ride south of London. Hardy and Henniker met there during the months in 1893 during which they were collaborating on a short story, “The Spectre of the Real.”
Although historically grounded and geographically defined, the inn, within the argument of the poem, symbolizes the lure of fantasy and how easily people seek the dazzle of the ideal. No one on the inn’s serving staff knows either of the two diners. Yet so hungry are they for some touch of fantasy, they conjure a romantic ambiance around the two companions sharing a meal, a fantasy uncomplicated by reality. Their “swift sympathy” (Line 9) for two strangers reveals the depth of their need for romance. Their lives exist only in day-to-day routine busyness, and they escape into their fantasy. The staff, the speaker notes, “warmed as they opined / us more than friends” (Lines 5-6).
The staff are moved by “the spheres above” (Line 12), the cosmos itself, to see epic “bliss” (Line 15) in this couple, and yearn for such bliss themselves. The inn symbolizes the need to confirm the fantasy of romance despite, not because of, the evidence.
Love With a Capital L
In the third stanza, Hardy’s speaker unexpectedly capitalizes love. Here, the poem positions Hardy as a Victorian with a Modernist sensibility. With that capital letter, the poem introduces the problematic nature of emotion, of reality robbed of its idealistic spiritual dimension.
Love with a capital L symbolizes the poem’s wistful nostalgia for a world suddenly rendered distant and without love. As David Wells argues, although Hardy was born barely two years into Queen Victoria’s reign, Hardy allies here with the Modernists, many of whom were half Hardy’s age when “At an Inn” was composed (Wells, David N. “Thomas Hardy’s Poetry and International Modernism.” The Thomas Hardy Journal, 2014). Hardy asks a question that other Modernists, most notably Robert Frost, T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, and Wallace Stevens, have posed: How are we to live meaningfully without affirmation of any reality higher than the cycle of dust and lust?
The speaker understands that if Love operates, if the material world in fact sustains this higher spiritual idealism, then surely this meeting at this wayside inn should have been a radiant moment. Even the waitstaff assumes that the couple are in love: “We were left alone,” the speaker laments in Stanza 3, “[a]s Love’s own pair” (Line 17). As the speaker testifies, this relationship is hardly Love. Rather the concept of an ideal and spiritual emotion only leaves the speaker wistful and sorrowful. The capital L taunts the speaker by reminding them that love is a cruel disappointment.
The Quiet Fly
The speaker notes the flies that buzz about the windowpanes of the country inn. This reference deflates the romantic setting and symbolizes how far removed this rendezvous is from the wonder and grandeur of love.
The reference in Lines 23 and 24 introduces the speaker’s unsettling reality as they look back on this moment, and the depth of their regrets over what turned out to be a non-event in the inn. The staff, the speaker says, assume that the speaker and their beloved are so clearly “more than friends” (Line 6). But they are not. They maintain separate spaces and refuse to create the idyllic tableau of two lovers. Their behavior was so chilly that it even stills into quiet the blue-buzz of the flies on the window pane.
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