The Full Text of “As I Walked Out One Evening”
The Full Text of “As I Walked Out One Evening”
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“As I Walked Out One Evening” Introduction
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"As I Walked Out One Evening" is W.H. Auden's song of disillusionment, mortality, and love. The poem's speaker wanders out for an evening stroll and overhears a kind of debate between a young lover, who believes that "love has no ending," and all the city's clocks, which counter that "you cannot conquer time." These personified clocks sing of all life's disappointments and endings—but also suggest that, in spite of the fact that love does have an ending, one must nevertheless go on trying to "love your crooked neighbor / With your crooked heart." Love isn't a liberating, all-conquering force, this poem says: it's a humble, brave task, taken on in the face of death itself. This poem first appeared in Auden's 1940 collection Another Time.
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“As I Walked Out One Evening” Summary
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The speaker recalls going out for a stroll in the city one evening and imagining all the crowds of people on the sidewalk as fields ripe grain, ready to be reaped.
Near the overflowing river, under a railway arch, the speaker hears a young lover singing, "Love lasts forever."
The singer says that they will continue to adore their beloved until all sorts of impossible things happen: until China and Africa collide, rivers hop over mountains, and salmon sing.
In fact, the singer's love will last until the end of the world, when (as predicted in the biblical book of Revelations) the ocean dries up and seven symbolic stars go flying around in the sky like geese.
The singer concludes that time will run as quickly as a startled rabbit from the sheer force of their love: the singer's beloved is the absolute most beautiful person ever to live, in the singer's eyes, and their love might as well be the first and best love that ever existed.
The speaker then hears all of the city's clocks beginning to sing their own response to this young lover. "Don't be fooled," the clocks say: "Nobody wins against Time."
The clocks warn that, down in the dark caverns of nightmares, where Justice sits naked, Time watches young lovers and goes "ahem" as they kiss, alerting them to its presence.
And the exhilaration of love doesn't last: worries and annoyance gradually eat away one's life, and Time and mortality always win out eventually.
Even fresh spring valleys, the clocks go on, fill up, shockingly, with snow. Time breaks up every dance and brings an end to the elegant curve of every diver's fall.
The clocks seem, now, to speak to everyone, telling all and sundry to wash their hands, gaze into the sink, and think about everything they've missed out on.
Every ordinary cupboard and bed, the clocks sing, contains a metaphorical frozen glacier or an empty desert, reminding people of mortality and loss—and even a cracked teacup can open the path to the underworld.
Down in this land of the dead, the clocks go on, everything feels meaningless, nonsensical, and corrupt: panhandlers hold auctions to sell the money they've collected, the murderous fairy-tale giant of "Jack and the Beanstalk" is strangely charming, the innocent "lily-white boy" from an old folk song is a noisy drunkard, and Jill from "Jack and Jill" is promiscuous.
Look in the mirror, the clocks tell whoever's listening: face up to your unhappiness over all these disappointments, and acknowledge that life is a gift, even when you're so dejected that you can't believe this.
Go and look out the window, the clocks go on, and feel yourself starting to cry hot tears: you have to go on trying to love your imperfect, fallible fellow people with your own imperfect, fallible heart.
By the time the clocks stopped singing, the speaker finishes, it was very late in the evening. The lovers had left, and the river flowed on just as it always did.
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“As I Walked Out One Evening” Themes
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The Power of Love vs. the Power of Time
“As I Walked Out One Evening” suggests that love isn’t a blissful escape from the world, but rather a difficult and worthy endeavor that people take on in spite of time, change, and mortality.
Out for a stroll one day, the poem’s speaker overhears a debate between the personified forces of love and time. First, the speaker hears a young lover singing about their immortal passion: this singer will love their “dear,” they declare, until “the salmon sing in the street.” Then, the speaker hears all the “clocks” of the city countering that nothing is immortal: time conquers all, and an awareness of this haunting fact spoils not just delusions of eternal love, but a lot of everyday life. And yet, despite the fact that time always wins, the clocks go on, life remains a “blessing,” and people must do their best to “love” each other even in a “crooked,” imperfect, and impermanent world. By undermining airy wishful thinking about immortal loves, the poem makes a subtle case for a deeper, more difficult kind of love: a love of the world, its people, and its “blessings” that persists even in the face of death, disillusionment, and defeat.
Right from the start, the young lover’s song of eternal passion sounds delusional. All around this lover are crowds of people that the speaker perceives as “fields of harvest wheat," ripe grain that’s about to be cut down, perhaps by the Grim Reaper himself. The lover is also standing next to a river and a railway—both symbols of the unstoppable onward rush of time—at “evening," when the sun is setting and the day is ending.
But the lover ignores all of these reminders of mortality, too caught up in a fantasy that “Love has no ending” to see them. The images of the singer's beloved as the “Flower of the Ages,” the loveliest person ever to live, suggest that this person is living in a childish dreamworld, cut off from reality. Life and love might look beautiful and eternal in this fairy-tale land, the poem hints, but that’s all an illusion.
When the clocks speak up and tell the lover that “you cannot conquer time,” they bring such fantasies sharply to earth. In an ominous answering song, the clocks warn that not only does love not last forever, nothing does: “Time” is always lurking in the background to “cough[] when you would kiss.” This realization can make everyday life feel pretty grim, empty, and disillusioning. Anyone who lives long enough, the poem suggests, will at some point stare gloomily into the bathroom sink and “wonder what [they’ve] missed,” and see their youthful fantasies as mere shadows from the “land of the dead.”
But that doesn’t mean that people should give up on love or hope. Rather, the clocks declare, people must come to terms with mortality and disillusionment, learning to see life as a “blessing” even when they’re too unhappy to “bless” it themselves, and to “love [their] crooked neighbour / With [their] crooked heart.” In other words, everyone has to learn that love isn’t a blissful, timeless escape from grim reality. Rather, it’s a humble, tiring, eternal, and eminently worthwhile task—one that involves reckoning with death, imperfection, and disappointment, not fantasizing that they can be defeated.
Where this theme appears in the poem:- Lines 1-60
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Line-by-Line Explanation & Analysis of “As I Walked Out One Evening”
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Lines 1-4
As I walked ...
... of harvest wheat.The first lines of "As I Walked Out One Evening" plunge readers into a world where the ordinary and the fantastical interweave—that is, the world we live in.
As the poem begins, a speaker tells the tale of an evening stroll "down Bristol Street," an unremarkable road that runs through the English city of Birmingham. But the speaker describes this ordinary walk in the language of an old song: the words "As I walked out one evening" are a traditional ballad opener. Whatever happened as the speaker "walked out" on this perfectly normal evening, the reader senses, it's going to be a tale.
And almost immediately, the scene of the speaker's walk transforms. All at once:
The crowds upon the pavement
Were fields of harvest wheat.This metaphor feels more like a metamorphosis! The image of the wheat fields appears so suddenly that it's as if the speaker has had a kind of epiphany, a lightning-quick realization. Seeing the "crowds" as "fields of harvest wheat," the speaker paints a picture of a vast expanse of faces, all similar as one wheat-stalk to another, all golden in the low "evening" light—and all ripe and ready to be "harvest[ed]." And only the Grim Reaper himself harvests humans.
This metaphor subtly shows that the speaker, looking over the crowds at sunset, has just realized two things at once:
- People are all more or less the same—all in the same "field" together, all dealing with the same problems.
- No one is ever too far from death.
In other words, this speaker's ballad will be a tale of the human condition. And by mingling images and styles from folk songs, fairy tales, and everyday life, the speaker will suggest that coming to terms with being alive means understanding how fantasy and reality interweave—and clash.
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Lines 5-12
And down by ...
... in the street, -
Lines 13-20
"I'll love you ...
... of the world." -
Lines 21-24
But all the ...
... cannot conquer Time. -
Lines 25-28
"In the burrows ...
... you would kiss. -
Lines 29-32
"In headaches and ...
... To-morrow or to-day. -
Lines 33-36
"Into many a ...
... diver's brilliant bow. -
Lines 37-40
"O plunge your ...
... what you've missed. -
Lines 41-44
"The glacier knocks ...
... of the dead. -
Lines 45-48
"Where the beggars ...
... on her back. -
Lines 49-56
"O look, look ...
... your crooked heart." -
Lines 57-60
It was late, ...
... river ran on.
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“As I Walked Out One Evening” Symbols
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The River
The poem's "deep," "brimming" river is a symbol of life itself. Always flowing onward in the background, the river reflects the personified clocks' sober reminders that time conquers everything in the end: much like time, the river is never going to stop or turn back.
But the image of the river softens the clocks' grim images a bit, hinting that this constant flow is perfectly natural—and has its beauty, too.
Where this symbol appears in the poem:- Line 5: “down by the brimming river”
- Line 60: “the deep river ran on”
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“As I Walked Out One Evening” Poetic Devices & Figurative Language
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Personification
In this poem, personification transforms time into Time: a calm, patient destroyer, lying in wait to bring an end to everything.
Time gets introduced here by a chorus of similarly personified clocks—"all the clocks in the city," in fact. As they "whirr and chime" their reply to the idealistic young lover, they seem like Time's cowed servants or messengers, warning anyone who cares to listen that—as they well know—"You cannot conquer Time."
The clocks go on to describe Time as a lurking presence who hangs out in the dark "burrows of the Nightmare" and "coughs" when young lovers are just about to "kiss." This personification casts Time as both a sinister figure and a curiously droll one: that little "ahem" of a cough makes Time sound as if he finds it pretty funny to interfere with lovers' pleasures. In fact, it's merely Time's "fancy" to bring an end to all human endeavor, "break[ing]" every dance and every dive. Time's amusement is humanity's destruction.
All this personification presents Time as a rather heartless fellow, toying with those who are "deceive[d]" into thinking they can cheat him. But the poem also hints that he's essential: one can't have either a dance or a dive without him, even if he also brings these lovely activities to an end.
And anyway, as the clocks say, Time is just a reality—a presence that everyone has to learn to live with. What's important, the clocks insist, is to "bless" life as best as one can in spite of the fact that Time always wins in the end.
Where personification appears in the poem:- Lines 21-24: “But all the clocks in the city / Began to whirr and chime: / "O let not Time deceive you, / You cannot conquer Time.”
- Lines 25-28: “"In the burrows of the Nightmare / Where Justice naked is, / Time watches from the shadow / And coughs when you would kiss.”
- Lines 31-32: “And Time will have his fancy / To-morrow or to-day.”
- Lines 35-36: “Time breaks the threaded dances / And the diver's brilliant bow.”
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Allusion
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Simile
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Metaphor
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Repetition
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Alliteration
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Assonance
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Consonance
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"As I Walked Out One Evening" Vocabulary
Select any word below to get its definition in the context of the poem. The words are listed in the order in which they appear in the poem.
- Brimming
- The Flower of the Ages
- Burrows
- The diver's brilliant bow
- Jack
- The Lily-white Boy
- Roarer
- Jill
- Scald
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(Location in poem: Lines 5-6: “And down by the brimming river / I heard a lover sing”)
Full almost to overflowing.
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Form, Meter, & Rhyme Scheme of “As I Walked Out One Evening”
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Form
"As I Walked Out One Evening" is built like a long ballad: it uses fifteen four-line stanzas, or quatrains, with a singsong rhyme scheme and a deceptively simple meter.
This song-like form fits the poem's events. In the poem, the speaker first overhears a man singing about his (supposedly) immortal love, then hears "all the clocks in the city" whirring and chiming their way through a clever reply: "O let not Time deceive you, / You cannot conquer time," they sing.
Because the speaker's own voice takes the same simple, musical form as the songs of the lover and the clocks, the whole poem ends up feeling like an old folk song—a tale not just as old as time, but about time. Learning that time breaks down everyone and everything, the poem's simple form suggests, is a fundamental part of being a person.
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Meter
The meter in "As I Walked Out One Evening" fits right in with the poem's allusions to ballads and nursery rhymes. Like a lot of those old forms, this poem uses trimeter, a meter in which each line has three strong stresses, as in line 49:
O look, look in the mirror
While each line has three stressed beats, for the most part, those beats don't always fall in the same pattern; the poem doesn't stick to a single kind of metrical foot throughout. This accentual meter means the poem can build all sorts of different rhythms around those three constant beats. This is a "crooked" meter to describe a "crooked" world!
However, a lot of the poem does fall into the rhythm of iambic trimeter, a meter in which each line uses three iambs—metrical feet that go da-DUM, as in lines 3-4:
The crowds | upon | the pavement
Were fields | of har- | vest wheat.But listen to the different rhythm of line 44:
A lane | to the land | of the dead.
Here, the poem uses both iambs and anapests (feet that go da-da-DUM) to create a rumbling, urgent rhythm, like wheels rolling inexorably down that frightening "lane."
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Rhyme Scheme
"As I Walked Out One Evening" uses a musical ABCB rhyme scheme. In other words, the second and fourth lines of each stanza rhyme, but the first and third don't:
As I walked out one evening, A
Walking down Bristol Street, B
The crowds upon the pavement C
Were fields of harvest wheat. BThis familiar old pattern makes the poem sound like a ballad, a folk song, or a nursery rhyme—an effect that contrasts with the poem's sophisticated language and its very 20th-century images of staring gloomily into the bathroom sink in a town full of crowds and railway bridges.
This choice of a simple pattern of rhyme to communicate complex (and, paradoxically, timeless) ideas about time reflects the poem's world-weary tenderness. Trying to love a disappointing world with one's "crooked heart," this rhyme scheme suggests, is an ancient and universal task, no matter what modern trappings it comes disguised in.
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“As I Walked Out One Evening” Speaker
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The speaker doesn't clearly identify themselves in this poem. In fact, most of what the speaker does is listen: first to a young lover singing under a railway bridge, then to the city's "clocks," which counter the lover's idealism with reminders of mortality and disappointment.
But the way the speaker listens—and the words assigned to the clocks—suggest that this speaker might be feeling rather disillusioned and dejected. When the clocks instruct anyone listening to stand gloomily over the bathroom sink and "wonder what you've missed," the image is so very specific that it seems likely the speaker must sometimes do just this.
One might even read the poem as a dialogue between two parts of the speaker's own mind: an idealistic (and perhaps foolish) younger side, and a wearier, wiser, older side. In any case, keeping the speaker anonymous reflects the poem's idea that time comes for everyone.
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“As I Walked Out One Evening” Setting
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"As I Walked Out One Evening" is set at night on "Bristol Street"—an unremarkable road in Birmingham, the city where Auden spent most of his childhood. "Crowd[ed]" and industrial, sliced through by a "railway" bridge, Bristol Street is a pretty mundane setting. But its sheer urban normality is all part of the speaker's point. Ordinary life, with all its disappointments, worries, and wearinesses, is the stage upon which big questions of love, time, and death play out. The poem's setting suggests that the work of "lov[ing] your crooked neighbor / With your crooked heart" falls to everyone, everywhere, on every normal street.
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Literary and Historical Context of “As I Walked Out One Evening”
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Literary Context
Wystan Hugh Auden (1907-1973) first published "As I Walked Out One Evening" in his 1940 collection Another Time. Auden had such a distinctive and unusual poetic voice that many critics see him as a school of his own: he and his contemporaries Cecil Day-Lewis, Stephen Spender, Christopher Isherwood, and Louis MacNeice are sometimes classed together as the "Auden group."
Unlike many of the Modernist poets of his generation, Auden didn't abandon metered poetry for free verse. Instead, Auden was a great proponent of old poetic forms, plain and approachable language, and light verse: poetry, he believed, didn't have to be highfalutin to be serious and meaningful. His own poems often deal with death and suffering in a voice that's equal parts crisp, witty, and melancholic. But he also delighted in writing everything from pantoums to villanelles to scandalous limericks.
Auden was particularly interested in music, and wrote not only poems that responded to musical traditions (like this one, which quotes old ballads in its first lines), but libretti—that is, lyrics for operas or pieces of classical music. He was also a noted essayist, and his book The Dyer's Hand collects his reflections on the art and craft of poetry. Some of these he wrote when he was Oxford University's Professor of Poetry, a ceremonial position awarded to notable writers and critics.
Auden remains a well-known and well-loved poet. Writers like James Merrill and John Ashbery credit him as a major influence, and his poetry even makes some famous appearances in pop culture.
Historical Context
When Auden published "As I Walked Out One Evening" in 1940, he would have had every reason to feel world-weary, disillusioned, and heartbroken. By this time, World War II was in full swing, and all sorts of comfortable old certainties about the order of the world were in doubt. Many of Auden's poems from the war years, "As I Walked Out One Evening" included, grapple with the world's weaknesses and failings—and urge that people strive, in spite and because of those failings, to love each other.
Auden was horrified when war broke out in 1939, and wrote one of his most famous poems in response to the news (though he himself didn't have an especially high opinion of this poem in later years). By this time, he'd already left England for the U.S.—a move that some saw as a betrayal, though in fact Auden volunteered to return to England and join the army if he was needed. (The military politely turned him down: he was a little too old and untrained.) By leaving when he did, he just missed the Blitz, the infamous German bombing campaign that killed thousands of civilians and destroyed countless buildings all across the UK.
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More “As I Walked Out One Evening” Resources
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External Resources
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Auden's Influence — Read an appreciation of Auden that discusses his lasting influence.
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A Brief Biography — Learn more about Auden's life and work via the Poetry Foundation.
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Auden on Film — Watch footage of Auden reciting some of his light verse (and enjoy both his sense of humor and his wonderfully craggy face).
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The Poem Aloud — Listen to Auden himself reading this poem out loud.
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Auden and Music — Visit the British Library's website to learn more about how popular music influenced Auden's poetry—including this poem, which was originally titled "Song."
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LitCharts on Other Poems by W. H. Auden
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