Much like American poet Robert Frost, to whom Hardy is often compared given their nearly eight decades of literary productivity, Hardy straddles two eras. He is widely regarded as the preeminent British novelist of the Victorian era, his novels capturing the hard-scrabble conditions of the working class. Yet Hardy always considered himself first and foremost a poet. His poetry reveals a sensibility that is at odds with the High Victorian template of homey verses offering comforting inspirational wisdom about life and love, God and country. His poetry is far more in tune with the generation that emerged amid the apocalyptic anxieties triggered by the catastrophic experience of World War I, the self-styled Modernists, many of whom were born when Hardy was already in his 50s. Hardy’s poetry shares much with that generation’s sense of disillusionment, alienation, and pessimism.

Much as with Frost, Hardy’s affiliation with the Modernist movement did not include formal experiments. The Modernists delighted in upending virtually every inherited assumption about poetic form and prosody. “At an Inn” reflects Hardy’s roots in the 19th century. It maintains a tight rhythmic pattern that alternates line to line and a clean and predictable rhyme scheme. The theme of the poem and its tone, however, allies Hardy with the Modernist movement.

Modernists reject the enticing lure of sentimental abstracts and fetching ideals. In “At an Inn,” Hardy empties love of its promise. The speaker understands that the inn is a perfect setting to fall in love. Yet love does not happen. The irony that Hardy develops—when the two share a table, they cannot express their love; when the two are continents apart, they feel the urgent need to express that same love—reflects the cynicism, emotional paralysis, isolation, and disillusionment typical of Modernist poetics. Love is not merely elusive. Rather, it is a vicious joke that an indifferent universe plays on vulnerable, hungry hearts.