The River Runs On: An Analysis of the Stark Rule of Nature in “As I Walked Out One Evening”
Who does not love a nice stroll around the town? It is a lovely time to enjoy and ponder the questions of life. Author W.H. Auden gives his audience the experience of this in his poem “As I Walked Out One Evening.” This sixteen-stanza quatrain poem is about a man who decides to mosey around one evening on a crowded English street. He hears a lover singing to his beloved under a railway bridge by the river. The lover confesses his unending, unstoppable, and unique love (For there is none like it in all of history and no greater love, of course,) for his significant other. Of course, the narrator cannot turn his hear away from such a sappy confession as this lover’s. However, when the lover is finally finished with his song, a new song begins. This song, though, is neither the response of the significant other nor that of the narrator. It is, in fact, the voice of the city clocks. These pesky clocks rain on the lovers’ parade by reminding them how time is the only true unstoppable force in the universe, not love. Time pounds away at them, …show more content…
For nine stanzas the clocks drone on about how humankind cannot “conquer Time,” (24) and that the eventual “glacier” of death “knocks,” or overcomes, “the cupboard,” which is the material (41). This is an odd way to explain the constant and slow pursuit of death, seeing as a glacier is in a manmade cupboard. The clocks explain that “[…] the crack in the tea-cup opens / A lane to the land of the dead” (43-44). Even manmade things will break and meet their death just like its human creators will. The clocks go on to sing of how through life’s pains and the aging process, unavoidable death is the end of every person, no matter how strong his or her love, because “Vaguely life leaks away” (9.2). The last stanza of the poem, however, is the most
Who does not love a nice stroll around the town? It is a lovely time to enjoy and ponder the questions of life. Author W.H. Auden gives his audience the experience of this in his poem “As I Walked Out One Evening.” This sixteen-stanza quatrain poem is about a man who decides to mosey around one evening on a crowded English street. He hears a lover singing to his beloved under a railway bridge by the river. The lover confesses his unending, unstoppable, and unique love (For there is none like it in all of history and no greater love, of course,) for his significant other. Of course, the narrator cannot turn his hear away from such a sappy confession as this lover’s. However, when the lover is finally finished with his song, a new song begins. This song, though, is neither the response of the significant other nor that of the narrator. It is, in fact, the voice of the city clocks. These pesky clocks rain on the lovers’ parade by reminding them how time is the only true unstoppable force in the universe, not love. Time pounds away at them, …show more content…
For nine stanzas the clocks drone on about how humankind cannot “conquer Time,” (24) and that the eventual “glacier” of death “knocks,” or overcomes, “the cupboard,” which is the material (41). This is an odd way to explain the constant and slow pursuit of death, seeing as a glacier is in a manmade cupboard. The clocks explain that “[…] the crack in the tea-cup opens / A lane to the land of the dead” (43-44). Even manmade things will break and meet their death just like its human creators will. The clocks go on to sing of how through life’s pains and the aging process, unavoidable death is the end of every person, no matter how strong his or her love, because “Vaguely life leaks away” (9.2). The last stanza of the poem, however, is the most