The array of emotional contexts adds depth as Hardy, as if writing to his deceased wife, asks why they had drifted apart, why didn't they remember the good days of their youth to break the emotional barriers and re-connect. He laments about the simple truth, his wife will no longer be around in the lines: " And think for a breath it is you I see,/At the end of the alley of bending boughs,/ Where so often at dusk you used to be;" Hardy is coming to terms with fact that the person he had lived with for so long will no be standing at the end of the alley or ride "Along the beetling Beeny Crest,- These lines force the reader to confront his pain and his regret for not appreciating the simple times he and his wife shared. But it also asks whether Hardy is upset about not reconciling before Emma's death, or if her passing is forcing him to admit his own youth is dead. .
In the last stanza of "The Going" Hardy writes, " All's past amend, Unchangeable. It must go./ I seem but a dead man held on end, To sink down soon- He puts a period after the word "unchangeable" to emphasize finality. The lines read it's now too late to make any changes, to rectify mistakes, to share a moment again. And now he is a "dead man held on end", at the mercy of time of which no one has any control. The success of "The Going" emanates from the sincerity of Hardy's emotions and thoughts, making it one of his best in the sequence.
The next poem poses questions as to what we know of death, and what happens afterwards. Hardy says there is no philosophy behind his work and he is merely jotting down his perceptions or "fugitive impressions." In "Your Last Drive" the scene is Emma driving (or riding) past the spot she will be buried just eight days later.
