*Dec 20 2025| As I Walked Out One Evening by W. H. Auden

As I Walked Out One Evening

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.

W. H. Auden
1907 –1973

>1 hamlet61: This poem rather grabbed me from the start. I'm not familiar with Auden but I felt like I knew this poem. After reading it a few times and thinking over it, I realise that it is like a grownup version of a story book I remember from when I was very young. It isn't very long, and is called Early One Morning It starts like so...

"Early one morning I jumped out of bed. The day was beginning all fresh and new.
The house was quiet. I opened the door. I had never been up so early before.
The garden was freshly washed in the dew."

... and goes on to describe the wonder a small child finds in their own garden while the day is just beginning and everything is quiet, peaceful. It gradually gets noisier and busier and ends with his father's alarm clock going off and the words...

"Get up, get up, get up today. Sleepy-head to stay in bed. It isn't early now," it said.

It's strange some times isn't it? How a poem or a painting or a song can take you back to somewhere you've been before and let you live the moment again in some way.

Thank you for sharing it. I'm looking forward to hearing what everyone makes of a few lines in there that I struggled to understand.

You are welcome.

Which lines caused struggle?

Maybe I can provide clarity and or/interpretation.

Matt

>1 hamlet61: I haven't met an Auden poem I didn't like. Sadly, I don't know why I haven't reached out for more--it's inexplicable, really. Matt, I'm smitten by this new-to-me poem.

The monster subjects, Time and Death, are topics for poets. While we mere mortals are extremely familiar with that Pair, it takes a poet (and here, a great poet) to express what we desperately only wish we could.

I'll be re-reading this poem over the week. There are a remarkable quantity of lines that stopped me in my tracks, lines that I want and need to absorb deeply through my eyeballs, multiple times.

Here's a pair that stunned me:

Life remains a blessing
Although you cannot bless.

My god. Isn't that unarguably, achingly true?

>4 DebiCates: These are mine:

And the crack in the tea-cup opens
A lane to the land of the dead.

>5 hamlet61: Oh, yes! Another pair I noticed too. It just gave me chills again. One little crack and suddenly, we know we are on the lane.

Many surprising lines, though not always confusing: that ocean, folded and hung up to dry, never an image held in my mind before, but immediately clear how even vast & eternal things also must see an end.

I wonder at the second half of the poem, seemingly a song delivered by the clocks, to mirror the song in the first half, sung by the lover under the railway arch. So the poet hears two songs, is separate from each. What does the poet make of them? Not sure. Interesting too, though, that the poet merely comments at the close that the river runs on, after each song is over, and the poet is there too, watching it.

It isn't my absolute favourite by him but I love Auden to bits. I would rank him in my six indispensable modern poets - W.B. Yates - T.S. Eliot - Dylan Thomas - Ted Hughes and Seamus Heaney with him.

I have Auden's collected works in my library and dip into it often.

In this "lyric" Auden juxtaposes the beauty of love with the fleeting quality of time. So it is about seizing the moment and not letting the chance of love pass you by. The stark opposites of joy and sorrow; life and death; failure and achievement is reflected in the differing tone of several of the stanzas.

Seemingly very simple but as always with Auden there are layers of cleverness.

>3 hamlet61: It's this stanza Matt:

‘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.

It kind of feels like things turned about backwards. But, raffling banknotes? And what is a 'Roarer' and who is Jill?

>9 TonjaE: He is playing with nursery rhyme in his image of Jill. "Jack and Jill went up the hill" - a "roarer" would be someone prone to inebriation and the Lily-white boy is taken from an old English folk song.
The unique line here is beggars raffling banknotes which you are close to right about Tonja it is more turning the world upside down than backwards.

‘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.’

Especially loved these lines. Despite the idea introduced earlier in the poem that perhaps time can conquer love, there is a sort of eternal love in these stanzas. Life remains a blessing, we remain loving our neighbours. Perhaps love is the only thing that is eternal.

I'm intrigued with the way the cadence breaks in the last line of this excerpt — following the meter, I would expect the last line to read something like, 'With all your crooked heart', but instead Auden breaks the pattern. I noticed this but confess I'm not really sure what it means.

>10 PaulCranswick:

I have always been intrigued by the Lily-white Boy. The Jill has always been obvious even though separated from Jack the Giant Killer.

I love this poem because of Auden's abrupt shift without breaking rhyme or meter.

And, considering that this was my week to post, may I say that I love our group

Poetry is power.

--Matt

>12 hamlet61: Well said Matt, I am really enjoying the group also and mostly the weekly picks have been really good.

>12 hamlet61: I love it, too, Matt, and it's great to hear you feel that too.

Right on, man! Poetry IS power.

:)

>1 hamlet61: a wonderful choice, wondrous is a word that comes to mind, there's hope that can be held onto in those moments that feel a little desolate.

Time's little reminder to enjoy it while you can:
"Time watches from the shadow
And coughs when you would kiss."

It will end:
"‘O stand, stand at the window
As the tears scald and start;"

And time moves on:
"And the deep river ran on."

A beautiful poem but full of warnings of the inevitable in the face of time. Auden seems to hit the time and our relationship to it theme a lot. I don't know much about Auden but after glancing through his many time poems he would seem to have had personal issues around his spiritual place in and relationship to time?

"Time will say nothing but I told you so."

>16 xkyzero: This, oh yes, that you pointed out, Rich.

"Time watches from the shadow
And coughs when you would kiss."

Time, the ultimate reminder of all that is beautiful. We know beauty precisely because of Time's forever nudges, sometimes by a mere "ahem" cough while It watches.

There's poetic and then there's sublime. Auden goes into the sublime territory more than once here. To already noted parts in >4 DebiCates: and >5 hamlet61: I'll add

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

It's just stunning all the things he packed into less then 20 quatrains, covering huge emotional and thematic territory.

>18 SandraArdnas: Time, as an abstract concept, is poetic
Time as a physical thing is also human, but a slave to entropy. Unidirectional and from order to disorder

I am so happy that everyone was as moved by this poem as I have been since first reading it in my 20s ( some 40 years ago!).

I await the next selection!

—Matt

Look what time does! It makes us so cynical. Once love meant something. Time has stolen it away.

>20 noseinabook58: I read this poem as both a rejoicing, and a heartbreak lamentation that, for the individual, nothing lasts forever.

To Time, though, love is reborn endlessly,
"And the deep river ran on."