As I Walked Out One Evening (Style)

Style

W. H. Auden is highly regarded for his formally crafted and musical lines. “As I Walked Out One Evening” is constructed using four-line stanzas called quatrains, the second and fourth lines locking rhymes to create on overall poetic form known as “common measure.” Emily Dickinson also used this form on a regular basis, and its origins are old. Each line holds three stressed syllables which echo the speaker’s footsteps toward the river, and as we walk down the crowded street with the speaker, we begin to feel the pacing of his stride in the rhythm of each line.

Each pattern of accents in a line is called a “foot,” and in this poem’s lines we feel the alternating feet stepping forward: “the crowds upon the pavement / were fields of Harvest wheat.” The “ta-dum ta-dum” unstressed and stressed metric foot is called an iamb. Iambic meter is probably the most familiar to our ears, used commonly by William Shakespeare, Robert Frost, John Milton and many rap artists writing today.