And now deemed come,
Came not: within his hold
Love lingered numb.
Why cast he on our port
A bloom not ours?
Why shaped us for his sport
In after-hours?
As we seemed we were not
That day afar,
And now we seem not what
We aching are.
O severing sea and land,
O laws of men,
Ere death, once let us stand
As we stood then!
Hardy is angered by the restricting man-made laws that suppress human joy, the particularly restrictive conventions of late Victorian and Edwardian England. 
 Note the two lines begin with an exclamatory ‘O’, an emotional appeal to the elements and to man. The device of repeating a word or phrase at the beginning of lines of poetry is known as  anaphora .
At An Inn