W. H. Auden

"As I Walked Out One Evening"

This poem by Auden consists of sixty lines divided into fifteen quatrains.  The rhyming scheme is somewhat unusual; only the second and fourth lines of each stanza rhyme.  The piece is rich with metaphor and simile;  "The crowds upon the pavement / Were fields of harvest wheat." (lines 3-4). As the title implies, Auden recounts walking out onto Bristol Street in the evening. Auden says that he heard a "lover singing / Under an arch of the railway".  The lover's song is an ode to his/her loved one and is detailed within the poem. The song is sung in hyperbole.  It is an expression of a love so great that it defies all conventions and expectations:

"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."

The lover's love is great and enduring but what of time?  Time becomes a main character for the remainder of the poem and is presented as an opponent of love:

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

Auden capitalizes the word time as if to deify it or to bring it to life.  Time is almost equated with death in certain instances, or at least, time serves as death's agent.
Auden's unconventional use of imagery and metaphor is particularly brilliant in "As I Walked Out One Evening," as in the following example;

"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."

What is meant with these lines?  Auden's language is cryptic.  Perhaps some Freudian free association was employed to contrive these riddles and they are written in a subconscious language known only to the writer.  Any interpretation seems forced and arbitrary.  Instead, I'd rather enjoy the word-play and take it as it is; without prescribing and projecting my own experiences therein.  If indeed these lines are written in a way which was very personal to the writer, my attempts to interpret them would only result in a sloppy transliteration.  Although a bit incomprehensible, the metaphors imagined through these words are beautiful and force the reader into his/her own subconscious mind.

As for the singer under the arch, it is unlikely that the song presented here was actually heard by Auden.  We cannot know if the singer existed at all.  That being the case, who is this singer? What does she/he have to offer in the way of symbolism?  Perhaps Auden did in fact hear someone singing under the railway that evening and perhaps he was inspired by that and could ascribe his own lyrics to the lover's song.

It seems as though volumes could be written solely for the purposes of interpreting this piece.