One condition Hardy often dramatizes is the relationship between human consciousness in a solipsistic state and the external world. This is a condition that the Romantics also acknowledged and strove to overcome. Hardy accepts it as a part of man's emotional life. Paulin quotes Hardy's notes on an essay by Ruskin. The interest for Hardy seems not to be in deciding whether the received impression is true or false, but in how it is affected by the state of mind of the observer.
All violent feelings have the same effect.
The second stanza introduces the fact that this moment in time also marks the end of a century. The landscape's features become like an immense body layed out. The first sentence shows the speaker's mind encompassing huge spaces of land and sky into the frightening spectacle of the Century's corpse in its coffin. It is a vision of death and cessation in elemental proportions. The sky is a lid.