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.