As I Walked Out One Evening

Question 1

When was it written?

Answer 1

November 1937

Question 2

What form is it:?

Answer 2

literary ballad, abcb quatrains with elements of the lyric

Question 3

How many speakers?

Answer 3

3 (the narrator, the singing lover, the clocks)

Question 4

What does Zsusza Rawlinson argue about its form?

Answer 4

‘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.

Question 5

What does his use of the ballad form suggest?

Answer 5

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.

Question 6

What is the dominant meter of the poem?

Answer 6

iambic trimeter

Question 7

What is the main idea?

Answer 7

it tempers its praise of love with an understanding that it is ephemeral and subject to vicissitudes of time.

Question 8

Although it’s in a ballad form…

Answer 8

it is not syllabically, Auden sticks to three stressed syllables per line

Question 9

‘You shall love your crooked neighbour / With your crooked heart’

Answer 9

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.

Question 10

‘the deep river ran on’

Answer 10

suggests a broader timelessness or a broader history, could suggest eternity, time continues unchanged.

Question 11

‘Into many a green valley / Drifts the appalling snow; / Time breaks the threaded dances / And the diver’s brilliant bow’

Answer 11

beautiful metaphors depict the physical and emotional erosion, the growing darkness of time encroaching. The greater powers like death infiltrate our personal domestic lives.

Question 12

Shifts in tense

Answer 12

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.

Question 13

Autumn / harvest season

Answer 13

metaphor of old age

Question 14

‘harvest wheat’

Answer 14

suggests crowds waiting to be cut down by time; death presented as a reaper

Question 15

‘the seven stars go squawking’

Answer 15

the Pleiades (cluster of stars) were known in mythology as the ‘seven systers’

Question 16

‘the first love of the world’

Answer 16

biblical allusion to Adam and Eve

Question 17

Where does the main tone change occur?

Answer 17

stanza 6 with ‘But’

Question 18

framed narration

Answer 18

the first person narrative persona is anonymous and detached - a recorder of events

Question 19

voice of the lover?

Answer 19

devoted, romantic, naive, exaggerated poetic, hyperbolic

Question 20

voice of time

Answer 20

personification, viewpoint of reality, disenchantment

Question 21

allusions to f’d up fairytales

Answer 21

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.

Question 22

‘the glacier knocks in the cupboard’

Answer 22

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.

Question 23

when does the natural world invade?

Answer 23

the 11th stanza

Question 24

Davison

Answer 24

‘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’