Auden's "As I walked out one evening" is concerned with
the effect of the passing of time on love. Written in a deceptively simple language, the
poem interweaves three different voices: a passing observer hears the voice of one of
two lovers promising the other that their love will never finish. The third voice, which
we start to hear in the sixth stanza, is not that of the other lover but of all the
clocks in the city, a symbol of the passing of time. In what amounts to more than half
the length of the poem, the clocks counter the promise of eternal love made by the
second voice. The images they use convey the central idea that "vaguely life leakes
away" and that love is therefore finite.
The last stanza
devoted to the clocks also introduces the theme of human crookedness, which may directly
refer to the historical context of the poem with the world swiftly moving toward the
Second World War.
The deep river running on at the end of
the poem represents a different, more natural way of measuring time with respect to the
mechanized chiming of the clocks. The fact that the river continues to run may be
auspicious for the lovers whose feeling could continue to flourish even in the most
adverse conditions.
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