Hardy's Complex Love: "At an Inn"

Thomas Hardy's "At an Inn" is one of the most psychologically complex poems in the Pre-1900 Love Poetry Anthology. Where "The Ruined Maid" uses irony to expose social hypocrisy, "At an Inn" turns irony inward — exploring the gap between appearance and reality, between what the world sees and what the lovers feel, between desire and the constraints that prevent its fulfilment.

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Context

AO3 — Context: The poem is believed to have been inspired by a visit Hardy made to an inn with Florence Henniker in 1893. Henniker was a writer and society figure with whom Hardy was deeply (and probably unrequitedly) in love. They were observed together at the inn and assumed by the staff to be lovers — an assumption that was, according to Hardy, painfully untrue. Hardy was married to his first wife, Emma, at the time; the marriage was unhappy, but Hardy's emotional attachments to other women were constrained by social convention, his public reputation, and — in Henniker's case — her unwillingness to enter a physical relationship.