As I Walked Out One Evening Flashcards
When was it written?
November 1937
What form is it:?
literary ballad, abcb quatrains with elements of the lyric
How many speakers?
3 (the narrator, the singing lover, the clocks)
What does Zsusza Rawlinson argue about its form?
‘uses the typical ballad opening… for an English pastoral or folk song’, but ‘the poem’s structure, along with the three voices of which it is composed, reinforce as well as disrupt atemporal universality’ undermining the lovers song as the poem darkens.
What does his use of the ballad form suggest?
It is conveying popular common wisdom, something we all know. It’s expressing truth as a kind of commonplace that is shared, like the tune itself.
What is the dominant meter of the poem?
iambic trimeter
What is the main idea?
it tempers its praise of love with an understanding that it is ephemeral and subject to vicissitudes of time.
Although it’s in a ballad form…
it is not syllabically, Auden sticks to three stressed syllables per line
‘You shall love your crooked neighbour / With your crooked heart’
Auden restates the biblical commandment in terms suitable to the flawed reality of human beings; we are bound to each other precisely by the circumstances that the poem describes and by the crookedness of their hearts.
‘the deep river ran on’
suggests a broader timelessness or a broader history, could suggest eternity, time continues unchanged.
‘Into many a green valley / Drifts the appalling snow; / Time breaks the threaded dances / And the diver’s brilliant bow’
beautiful metaphors depict the physical and emotional erosion, the growing darkness of time encroaching. The greater powers like death infiltrate our personal domestic lives.
Shifts in tense
begins in past tense, then dramatic present for the overhead song, then moves into past tense at the end to emphasise that time has moved on.
Autumn / harvest season
metaphor of old age
‘harvest wheat’
suggests crowds waiting to be cut down by time; death presented as a reaper
‘the seven stars go squawking’
the Pleiades (cluster of stars) were known in mythology as the ‘seven systers’
‘the first love of the world’
biblical allusion to Adam and Eve
Where does the main tone change occur?
stanza 6 with ‘But’
framed narration
the first person narrative persona is anonymous and detached - a recorder of events
voice of the lover?
devoted, romantic, naive, exaggerated poetic, hyperbolic
voice of time
personification, viewpoint of reality, disenchantment
allusions to f’d up fairytales
an adult, distorted interpretation of the effects of time. Our perceptions of the innocence and joys of life can be distorted by time, just like how we see the darker side of nursery rhymes as we get older.
‘the glacier knocks in the cupboard’
ordinary life is haunted by, disrupted by elemental forces; the domestic includes tragic and uncanny dimensions which return like repressed parts of the psyche in the poem.
when does the natural world invade?
the 11th stanza
Davison
‘it is amazing that this tawdry world of cracked tea-cups, seduced Jills and crooked hearts, should “remain a blessing.” Fallen man and his fallen world are worthwhile’
