At an Inn

The speaker feels inner turmoil, with the poem’s structure reflecting the back and forth of the speaker’s mind. They are torn by the yearning in their heart, the conventions of their era that regard such emotions as dangerous and immoral, and their regrets over what they failed to do then and cannot do now. The poem’s formal structure suggests the mechanics of memory itself.

The poem’s form and meter reflect that back-and-forth conflict. At first read, the poem appears conventional, tidy, and predictable: five eight-line stanzas, or octets. Reinforcing that sense of convention, the poem uses a predictable rhyming scheme: ABABCDCD. Everything appears tight, clean, orderly.

However, the lines reveal tension and exploit conflict. The lines are actually irregular in their meter. The lines alternate between iambic tetrameter—lines with four, two-beat units of unstressed, then stressed beats—and iambic diameter—lines with two, two-beat units of unstressed, then stressed beats. This reflects the speaker’s tight-lipped determination not to give in to the riotous emotions that they feel and that, much later, they regret never expressing.

The complex emotional dynamic in the poem is between what the speaker remembers about that afternoon at the inn and how much that memory pains them now.