WH Auden's poem “As I went out one evening” belongs to the long tradition of poems that tell the story of the struggle between love and time. Like others, Auden's lover uses the imagery of “The Flower” (l. 19) and the grandiose love affirmations “Till China and Africa meet” (l. 10) to impress or convince the lover invisible to satisfy his desires. However, Auden departs from this tradition in other ways. For example, these other works are mainly poems of seduction. In Andrew Marvell's "To His Coy Mistress", time is (by association) a third party in seduction, invoked to create fear and put pressure on the seduced by reminding her of her mortality, as well as the seducer's vulnerability, and thus push her towards the own purposes. “As I Walked Out One Evening” is a narrative poem, and essentially a dialogue between a lover speaking to the invisible love and time responding to counter his claims. Auden argues that people are unaware of the world they live in and do not truly understand what it means to love and live using apocalyptic imagery and a movement of time and water. “As I Walked Out One Evening” was written in 1937, a time of turmoil throughout the world and especially in Europe: the world was in a lull between “the war to end all wars” and the second “war to end all wars” and Hitler was gradually rising to power at that time. Auden was very aware of the political climate and this is reflected in his diction in the last part of the poem. The fact that there are three distinct parts to this poem, the lover's speech and the two halves of the time speech, is indicative of the contemporary political climate: because World War I was so terrifying, many people could not and would not believe which could happen again... in the middle of the paper... the poem: the observer who is part of the scene and yet separated from it, who has a more distant perspective. In the first stanza, After the exposition or setting, Auden uses the metaphor of "The crowds on the pavement/Were corn-harvesting fields" (ll. 3-4) as observed by the narrator to first foreshadow the immediacy of time . “Reaping wheat” is both something alive and something about to be mowed down and harvested en masse. The observer already has the knowledge that comes so painfully in stanza 14 for the lover, and at the end not only “the deep river flowed” (l. 60), but also the narrator. I am still here, “late in the evening” (l. 57) observing the river of life that continues to flow, even after “the clocks had stopped ringing” (l. 59) and “the lovers had gone” (l. 58), symbolizing that life will endure the ravages of both death and time.