As I Walked Out One Evening

[quote]
the crowds upon the pavement. were fields of harvest wheat. and down my the brimming river. I Heard a lover sing. under an arch of the railway. "love has ending. i'll love you dear,ill love you till china and africa meet, and the river jumps over the mountain and the salmon sing in the street. I'll love you till the ocean is folded and hung up to dry. and the seven stars go squawking like geese about th sky. the year shall run like rabbits for in my arams i hold the flower of the ages, and the frirst love of the world."
[unquote]

The poem speaks of a young lover on a bridge watching the world go by on a normal day while he himself fantasizes about his love. He is day-dreaming. The poet in the narrator who subtly draws to the readers notice the stark irony between the two situations. While the world continues its dreary existence. To quote the poet: 'the crowds upon the pavement. were fields of harvest wheat' - meaning the sun was shining so brightly that people were as cooked as harvest wheat, i.e. ready to fall) and yet the lover is so involved in his fantasizing about his love that he barely notices the pain of the others. He describes his love in emphatically floral terms. [quote - all the lovers statements] oblivious to the goings-on around him.

This poem draws out the irony between two schools of thought that are prdominantly seen in this world at all stages (and ages!) of life. One full of innocence (often mistaken for carelessness) and the other practicality (often mistaken, for pessimism or over-cautiousness). The poets presents these two views and the reader is left but to marvel at the subtlety of the poet in bringing these two viewpoints so perfectly together.

Though I haven't read the rest of the poem, apart from what you posted here, I definitely would like to read it.

Thank you.
Born Stinger

As I walked out one evening,
Walking down Bristol Street,
The crowds upon the pavement
Were fields of harvest wheat.

And down by the brimming river
I heard a lover sing
Under an arch of the railway:
'Love has no ending.

'I'll love you, dear, I'll love you
Till China and Africa meet,
And the river jumps over the mountain
And the salmon sing in the street,

'I'll love you till the ocean
Is folded and hung up to dry
And the seven stars go squawking
Like geese about the sky.

'The years shall run like rabbits,
For in my arms I hold
The Flower of the Ages,
And the first love of the world.'

But all the clocks in the city
Began to whirr and chime:
'O let not Time deceive you,
You cannot conquer Time.

'In the burrows of the Nightmare
Where Justice naked is,
Time watches from the shadow
And coughs when you would kiss.

'In headaches and in worry
Vaguely life leaks away,
And Time will have his fancy
To-morrow or to-day.

'Into many a green valley
Drifts the appalling snow;
Time breaks the threaded dances
And the diver's brilliant bow.

'O plunge your hands in water,
Plunge them in up to the wrist;
Stare, stare in the basin
And wonder what you've missed.

'The glacier knocks in the cupboard,
The desert sighs in the bed,
And the crack in the tea-cup opens
A lane to the land of the dead.

'Where the beggars raffle the banknotes
And the Giant is enchanting to Jack,
And the Lily-white Boy is a Roarer,
And Jill goes down on her back.

'O look, look in the mirror,
O look in your distress:
Life remains a blessing
Although you cannot bless.

'O stand, stand at the window
As the tears scald and start;
You shall love your crooked neighbour
With your crooked heart.'

It was late, late in the evening,
The lovers they were gone;
The clocks had ceased their chiming,
And the deep river ran on.

Something really important about understanding this poem is to look at the *contrasts* in it. There are two speakers and one narrartor. The two speakers understand life very differently. One is full of innocence, and one knows everything there is to know about life. The first speaker is the young man who is wooing someone. The second speaker is a clock. And the narrartor begins the poem, ends the poem, and is what holds the two speakers together.

There narrator opens the poem saying "As I walked out one evening". He seems like an old man, someone who understands the world. He walks along the street at what a romantic time of day. The sun is setting and making everything golden, even "the crowds on the pavement are fields of harvest wheat" (they are painted gold by the setting sun). So predicatably, the narrator comes across a young man trying to romance a young woman while hiding under a bridge (maybe they're both under there, or maybe he is yelling up at her window). This is where the first speaker begins, Stanza 3.

In Stanza 3, we are no longer reading the thoughts of the man walking, instead, we are hearing all the impossible promises the young man is making. From Stanzas 3 - 5, we hear the young lover saying a lot of terribly corny things. Auden makes it sound poetic, but he is actually spoofing what the young lover is saying. It's the worst kind of syrupy disgusting lovey-dovey stuff in the world. Nonetheless, we can relate to what the young lover has to say. When you're in love, it really does seem as if
"in my arms I hold
The Flower of the Ages,
And the first love of the world."
So Auden is making fun of the young lover by making him say all these syurpy words, but at the same time he has compassion by making it sound sweet and poetic at the same time. He balances repulsion with compassion.

In Stanza 6 we are back to the narrartor, the man walking. He knows about the world, and about what happens to young lovers. They act foolishly and get their hearts broken, and love doesnt last forever. The narrartor hears clocks chiming in the distance as he thinks these things. To him, the clocks seem to speak. The clocks speak his thoughts for him.

So in Stanza 7 we are hearing the clocks speak (which really means we are hearing what the walking man is thinking about). So from Stanza 7 - 14 the clocks tell the truth about what happens to love. People grow old, people find out about sorrow, and loneliness. The years certianly dont run like rabbits, and people get stuck in the ruts and boredom of existence. People meet despair. Nonetheless, they still find a way to make sense out of everything. The world is never beautiful and rosy again like when you're a young lover, and everything seems old and ugly to you, including your own self. But instead of growing bitter about it, you have to realise that
"Life remains a blessing
Although you cannot bless"

In the last Stanza the clocks stop talking and we come back again the walking man. He doesnt have any comment to make, because the clock has spoken for him. All around him is the stillness of the night.

This poem is about Time and how we all have to face it. The clock is Time personified and made to speak like a person. It tells us what happens to all of us. We grow old, we meet despair. This poem is about foolishness, and sorrow, and how foolishness can lead to sorrow. Imagine if the young lover's girlfriend marries him, and then imagine her again ten years later with a job and kids and all the details and despair of life, and how she somehow has to find a way to keep going even though life seems ugly to her and it did not turn out like she thought it would. The poem is about how love is a lie, but at the same time, how love can still be true:
"You shall love your crooked neighbour
With your crooked heart."

Understanding who is talking in what part of the poem is really important to understanding the poem. There are 2 completely opposite points of view held together by one narrartor: to the lover everything is sweet, while to time everything is bitter. The truth is somewhere in between, life is bitter-sweet.

Confusion is abundant in W. H. Auden’s poem “Song”. Auden does not like to use many details for his characters. In his poem readers can never tell how old a character is or who a character is, or if the characters symbolize certain characters of time; for example, Father Time, Death, or even Adam. Auden uses three different characters in his poem “Song,” one of his characters is an old man. And there are also two other characters in the poem, the clocks, and a lover. Auden lets all three of his characters refer to themselves as I, so a reader can never exactly know who is talking unless they pay close attention. Auden does not use many details to tell you who the character is, but Auden leaves space for the readers to figure out who the characters are. He should not have written his poem like that, because it confuses readers really easy.
The reason the old man is confusing is due to the lack of details, and he refers to himself as I, through the rest of the poem other characters refer to themselves as I along with the old man. The old man’s character is not well put together, because he has the least amount of lines in the whole poem that do not tell us much about him. Auden give this stanza to the old man; “As I walked out one evening, Walking down Bristol Street, The crowds upon the pavement, Were fields of harvest wheat.” This is where Auden tends to not use much description. He leaves us to figure out who is walking and how old he is. To me, the person walking is most likely and old wise man. The old man probable has bad vision if he thinks that people on the pavement look like harvest wheat. The fact that the people on the pavement look like fields of harvest wheat, says that it is around sun-set. Also since the wise old man thinks that the people on the pavement look like harvest wheat, the old man probable grew up on a farm. Is that what Auden wanted his readers to get out of that stanza? One person’s ideals cannot be true to the poem, due to the fact that Auden did not give many details to the reader about what he or she is reading. Toward the end of the poem, the poem starts to talk about the old man again. Auden decides to give the old man a second chance at confusing the reader again. He lets the last stanza in the poem say nothing about the old man but be about the old man. In the stanza “It was late, late in the evening, The lovers they were gone; The clocks had ceased their chiming, And the deep river ran on.” Auden tells us through the poem that no longer are the clocks speaking to the reader. Only the old man is not mentioned, that means the wise old man is back in the end. It is really late, so the sky is probably dark by now. Auden leaves us to figure all that out on our own, also he leaves us to figure out a whole lot more. The old man was there hearing what the clocks had to say about the lover the whole time that the lover was singing, and the clocks were chiming. The old man is confusing here because he stayed and listened to the clocks chime for a vast amount of time. The old man did not say or think anything, so time probably said all he had to say on the subject of love. The old man also is confusing do to the fact he listened to the clocks. Auden probable wanted the old man to be meekly crazy. When I look back at the whole poem, a thought occurs to me. The old man could be “Father Time.” That would explain why he said there the whole time and listened to the clocks chime, and could actually understand what they were saying. The fact that Auden can use non-descriptive words, yet make a reader impose many different things about a character would confuse many readers; due to the fact that a reader would never know whether or not what they think is what Auden intended on that reader to get out of the poem.
The tone at the beginning of the poem is laid back, but then Auden talks about the old man walking down the brimming river, “And down by the brimming river, I heard a lover sing.” The poem just switches to a lover, Auden tends to do that a lot through this whole poem. He needs to alert the reader some how that a totally different character is going to speak. Auden lets the lover refer to it’s self as I also. This is making the poem even more confusing by having two characters so far refer to themselves as I. The stanzas about the lover have better imagery than the old man, and are more descriptive. But that does not help the reader due to the fact that the lover is never described only the person the lover is in love with is described. All of the imagery is about the lover’s love. Something that is immeasurably confusing is “The years shall run like rabbits, For in my arms I hold, The Flower of the Ages, And the first love of the world.” The lover really expects years to run like rabbits, but what does that really mean? That might mean that when the lover is with his or her lover that when they are together time is going by so fast, but only seems like moments. Then Auden gives the reader a hint of the sex of the lover by the statement about being “The Flower of Ages” which leads to hint that the lover singing is a male, since his lover is a famine object like a flower. Auden chooses a weird way to tell the readers that though. I would have been a lot easier if Auden would have given the lover a name or even given the lover a description. One of the most confusing statements that the lover says is “And the first love of the world” is kind of confusing due to the fact that the first lovers of the world were Adam and Eve. The lover must think that his lover is Eve and he is Adam. Auden might have put that line in the poem to portray the loves as Adam and Eve, to give the lover a more romantic tone.
The Lover is confusing and the tone is love sick, but the Clocks seem to win, when it comes to confusion and tone. The clocks have the best tone, their tone is gloomy and bereavement. The reason that time is bereavement is manly due to the statement “In headaches and in worry, Vaguely life leaks away, And time will have his fancy, Tomorrow or today.” Normally death will come to a person any day or maybe the next, eventually death will find you and get you. Auden says the same thing as time in this poem. He makes his character of the Clocks as Death. Auden seems to like hiding who his characters are really. The Clocks may have the best tone; but could possible be one on the most confusing, because all the Clocks say, are riddles. One of the most confusing riddles is “O plunge your hands in water, Plunge them in up to the wrist; Stare, stare in the basin, And wonder what you’ve missed.” This could be the most confusing stanza in the whole poem. The reason it could be the most confusing is due to the fact, that you get out of it what you want. There is a deeper meaning to that stanza than a reader could ever get just reading through the poem once.

Just to comment on the stanza that seems to have puzzled some readers, I think the 'land of the dead' that we see talked of is heaven, where beggars are so well off they can raffle banknotes, the Giant is kind to Jack instead of trying to 'grind his bones to make my bread' as he does in the fairystory. 'The Lily-white boy is a roarer' does refer to an English folk symbol, but I think Auden is imagining him to be gay, as 'roarer' was a slang term for a gay man. Auden was, of course, quite openly gay and this idea probably appealed to him.

'Jill goes down on her back' is , again, I think a sexual reference, rather than a reference to mortality, and Auden is here subverting the nursey rhyme of Jack and Jill, in which we are told that 'Jack fell down and broke his crown/ and Jill came tumbling after.'

I agree with the general tenet of most of the comments, that this is a dialogue between the romantics (the lover) and the realists ( the clocks). I don't think that the structure is difficult to follow; once you read it carefully, Auden is making it obvious when it is he, the everyman observer narrating, and when it is the lover, and when the clocks.

Personally, I think it is a wonderful poem, once of the ones that made Auden a major poet. As an enthusiast for English twentieth century poetry, it is very nice to see it being debated in a public forum

In response to Brandin's comment, we feel that we must make a few points.

1. Brandin, you have no grasp of the english language.
2. Your analytical skills are, at best, appalling.
3. You obviously have no idea what this poem is tryng to tell you.

This poem does indeed contain 3 "voices", through which the meaning is conveyed. There is the observer, the lover and the watches or clocks. Nowhere in the poem is the observer given a specfic age or gender. How you came to see an old man, we really don't know. It could be argued that the character is old, because of the use of the clocks and the references to the passing of time, and death and so on, but saying without a shadow of a doubt that it is an old man, is simply being mistaken. It could well be an old man, but we feel that it's by no means a sure thing and that the references to old age and death are most probably a glimpse of what may be to come in the future for the character.

The fields of harvest wheat is reference to the mood after world war two, that the individual is no longer important and that the lives of indiviuals are dispensable. Whether or not the observer grew up on a farm is completely irrelevant. The harvest wheat is purely a metaphor. it is no indication of the observer's eyesight.

Personally, we feel that it is not particularly confusing distinguishing which "character" is speaking. The lover's song is clearly put within inverted commas, asis the speech by time- and as for the 'old man' having no thoughts when the clocks are whirring and chiming- what are you on about? This whirring and chiming is not literally taking up that ammount of time, and no doubt the clocks were not really conveying that through their simple ticking, it is just what the passing of time represents to Auden.

class has ended, so we're off.
Lauren and Jonny

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The poem main theme is that pure love cannot last forever and time will take control and break down love.
"O let not Time decieve you
You cannot conquer Time."

The lovers song in stanzas 2-4 uses many poetic techniques to describe how their love will go on forever. Their love will only cease to exist when impossible things happen such as, "the river jumps over the mountain" and if "the seven stars go squaking like geese in the sky".

In stanza 6 Auden personifies Time. Time is portrayed as evil and sleezy,"oh let not Time decieve you".

"Time watches from the shadow//And coughs when you would kiss" suggests that Time is a voyeur and is disgusted by one the most common ways of showing love, kissing.
The word "coughs" also suggest that Time is spreading illness and disease which will get to you eventually.

"O plunge, plunge your hands in water
Plunge them in up to the wrists
Stare, stare in the basin
And wander what you have missed"
This stanza is Time commanding the lover to commit suicide as they have reached a comlete opposite from the song they where singing early, ultimate despair as the no longer "hold the Flower of Ages " in their arms.This stanza also conveys the power time has over you with the use of command verbs "stare" and "plunge".

"The glacier knocks in the cupboard
The desert sighs in the bed
And the crack in the tea cup opens
A lane to the land of the dead"
This part of the poem is suggesting that the lovers have seperated and that the space they previously shared is no barren and lifeless like a desert and that all the Love had brought life to the bed and cupboard but know it has gone there is nothing.
The crack in the tea cup is metaphorically linking back to "Vaguely life leaks away" as small amounts of you life fall away from you and you barely notice except you begin to become frail and weak.

Towards the end of the poem Auden changes the tone from a pessimistic veiw to that of a slightly more optimistic and hopefull tone.
"You shall love your crooked neighbour
With your crooked heart"
Here the poet is corrupting the bible as one of the commandments was to love your neighbour. Auden is suggesting that your love will never be pure like in the lovers song but you can still love your neighbour but selfishness and jealousy will always be in humans as we( i am sorry to say) are not perfect!

The very last stanza of the poem "As I Walked Out One Evening" shows that the lovers have seperated and that man has been beaten and the clocks have fallen and ceased but still time continues.
"The clocks has ceased their chiming
And the deep river ran on"

We were given this poem to analyze as a test to qualify for AP English. We got it without the actual title. This was the first time I seriously enjoyed reading a poem. Peoples different interpretations of love fascinates me. Reading through the comments, a lot of people said "he" as the lover, but it could be a girl too right? i thought that he was saying love between two people can be forever, like time; but people can't live forever, like when a clock stops ticking. i wrote something like that in my essay.
My favorite lines were what the lover sang. =D Oh and i noticed the "t" in time was capitalized in the poem. it personified time as if it were a person. i thought that was pretty cool.

First of all, i absolutely love this poem. i think it so accurately describes the way in which everyone should view love.

As hard as it was for me to learn, love does not last forever. here, a bystander (whom i believe to be Auden) overhears two lovers confessing their love for one another (the quoted part would be the lover's song).

The person listening beings to comment on the naivity of the two lovers. He says "you can not conquer Time" meaning love won't last. Time is personified here and given the human characteristic of wisdom. Time, unlike humans, knows that love is fleeting and is amused by the sight of it as "the clocks began to whirr and chime." Time acknowledges lovers foolishness as it "watches from the shadows, and coughs when you would kiss." Time has been around much longer than the lovers and thus knows the mistakes lovers make and the consequences that follow.

In the next stanza, the bystander then explains that with love, eventually trouble will come. "Into the green valley, drifts the appalling snow." The love that was once beautiful and alive is now destroyed. (I'm assuming from human faulties such as betrayal, jealousy, etc.)

In the next stanza, the watcher then explains that lovers will learn that they were so blinded by love, they had completely isolated themselves from reality/refused to accept it. (The plunging of the hands in water may be convey the ex-lover's want to commit suicide?)

stanza 11 has been widely interpreted to mean different things. I think that here Auden illustrate the ex-lovers moment of realization. "The glacier knocks in the cupboard" tells me that 'a light bulb went off' and "the crack in the tea-cup opens" means the ex-lover is starting to open up his eyes to the reality of love. This is also metaphorically linked to Auden's earlier line in which "vaguely life leaks away" meaning the love was dying, which means we can ssume the lover was slowly coming back to reality.

Auden then explains in the next stanza what is to be learned from a broken love and that is that all people have flaws. "And the crack in the tea-cup opens,
A lane to the land of the dead." The lover made the harsh realization that people are not perfect. The next stanza describes a few examples (which of, i can not exactly interpret).

The next stanza explains how this realization can leave people feeling hopeless and give up on love because one might feel "life remains a blessing, although you cannot bless."

The PURPOSE of this poeam is in the next stanza, when the bystander gives his take on love (which I believe to be Auden's). He revises the bible's scripture and says "You shall love your crooked neighbour, With your crooked heart." (MY FAAVORITE QUOTE OF ALL TIME!!) No one is perfect. Therefor, we need to accept and forgive each other for our mistakes because just as your neighbor has a crooked heart, so do you! In doing so, then we can experience love in its true sense and how it exists in reality.

The poem ends with the bystander revealing that the lovers did in fact seperate. Time could no longer mock them as it did in the beginning and thus "ceased their chiming" but continued on just as "the deep river ran on." Time and the bystander proved to be right and the reality of love was revealed,just as it always has and always will exist.

I know that poems are open to vast interpretation but I hope you all can understand my take on it!! I know it is a little depressing but I think for once, this poem reveals the truth about love unlike all the smoke and mirrors you see and hear in songs and on tv -as Auden portrays in the lover's song =). I think it is also important to understand too that Auden does not at all reject love here, he is just unveiling the truth about human nature (our inability to see reality as well as our inability to accept ones flaws when we ourselves have them) and also how culture has altered our perceptions of love. The sooner we learn and accept these truths, then we can finally love!

I'm currently teaching a selection of Auden's poetry to a group of English Literature students and thought I'd add my thoughts to those of the others who have commented so far.

For me, this poem is essentially about how 'Time' will eventually 'conquer' us all and the naive lover introduced in stanza 2 is warned by a personified Time that the promises s/he makes are essentially empty, although s/he doesn't yet realise this. (The lover is more likely to be a male speaking to a female since he refers to her as 'The Flower of the Ages')

In the first stanza, the narrator sets the scene: an evening walk down a busy city street where the pavement is so full of people they resemble a wheat field ready to be harvested. He leaves behind the crowds and comes across the lover singing to his beloved down by the river, tucked away beneath a railway arch.

The lover’s song promises unending love and devotion as the lover says his love will last until impossible things occur such as the ocean drying up and the stars ‘squawking like geese’. His description of his beloved as the ‘first love of the world’ alludes to the belief of young lovers that they are the only people to experience love.

At this point, ‘all the clocks in the city’ begin to chime the hour and the sound of their chimes serves as the warning offered in the stanzas which follow. The words attributed to the ‘clocks’ could be the words of a personified Time or could be what the chimes mean to the narrator when he hears them. If the latter, this lends extra bitterness to the tone and is my preferred reading of the poem.

Where the lovers dream of a future together, Time offers a ‘Nightmare’ world, lurking in the shadows and interrupting moments of intimacy: ‘coughs when you would kiss.’ The life they hope to share together, enjoying ‘years [that will] run like rabbits’ will instead ‘leak away’ full of ‘headaches’ and ‘worry’. Time is also described as a destructive force in stanza nine, one capable of taking you by surprise just as the unexpected snow.

In stanzas ten and eleven, Auden introduces familiar, domestic images such as the ‘basin’, ‘cupboard’, ‘bed’ and cracked ‘tea-cup’ and juxtaposes these with extreme features of the natural and eventually supernatural world. The homely features could be symbols of domestic drudgery – perhaps Auden is alluding to married life? The plunging of the hands in the basin could be seen as being something as simple as dishwashing where the washer-upper thinks of all the things they’ve missed out on. Notice the sighing desert in the bed – symbolic of barrenness, oppressiveness but a deep longing.

In the ‘land of the dead’, Auden turns to the childish world of nursery rhymes and fairy tales but subverts them. The beggars of rhymes such as ‘Tinker, tailor’ and ‘Hark, hark the dogs do bark’ are wealthy enough to be able to ‘raffle the banknotes’ and the terrifying giant in the ‘Jack and the beanstalk’ story charms rather than threatens. The ‘Lily-white boy’ of ‘Green grow the rushes oh’ and ‘Jill’ of ‘Jack and Jill’ also make an appearance but not quite as innocently as their original counterparts since Auden uses the slang term for a homosexual and Jill’s position seems sexually suggestive.

The antepenultimate and penultimate stanzas hold a bitter-sweet message: whilst the lover is distressed and in tears they are reassured that life is still a ‘blessing’ and there is still love, albeit ‘crooked’.

At the end of the poem, the lovers leave and the clocks stop chiming and all we are left with is the river, still running deep – symbolic perhaps of nature’s endurability and certainty and echoing the use of nature by the lover to prove his love will not end.

Auden’s poem offers a realist’s viewpoint on love – all-consuming and exciting in the initial moments but marred by the realities of life and the passage of time. The lovers leave in blissful ignorance of the warning offered by the chiming of the clocks and perhaps this is something we should be grateful for since if we knew what life had in store for us we might not see the point.