At an 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.