A Walk After Dark Poem Rhyme Scheme and Analysis
Rhyme Scheme: ABCDBC EFEGFG HIJHJI KLMKLM NOPONP QRSTUT KVWKVW GXGYXY| A cloudless night like this | A |
| Can set the spirit soaring | B |
| After a tiring day | C |
| The clockwork spectacle is | D |
| Impressive in a slightly boring | B |
| Eighteenth century way | C |
| - | |
| It soothed adolescence a lot | E |
| To meet so shamelesss a stare | F |
| The things I did could not | E |
| Be so shocking as they said | G |
| If that would still be there | F |
| After the shocked were dead | G |
| - | |
| Now unready to die | H |
| Bur already at the stage | I |
| When one starts to resent the young | J |
| I am glad those points in the sky | H |
| May also be counted among | J |
| The creatures of middle age | I |
| - | |
| It's cosier thinking of night | K |
| As more an Old People's Home | L |
| Than a shed for a faultless machine | M |
| That the red pre Cambrian light | K |
| Is gone like Imperial Rome | L |
| Or myself at seventeen | M |
| - | |
| Yet however much we may like | N |
| The stoic manner in which | O |
| The classical authors wrote | P |
| Only the young and rich | O |
| Have the nerve or the figure to strike | N |
| The lacrimae rerum note | P |
| - | |
| For the present stalks abroad | Q |
| Like the past and its wronged again | R |
| Whimper and are ignored | S |
| And the truth cannot be hid | T |
| Somebody chose their pain | U |
| What needn't have happened did | T |
| - | |
| Occuring this very night | K |
| By no established rule | V |
| Some event may already have hurled | W |
| Its first little No at the right | K |
| Of the laws we accept to school | V |
| Our post diluvian world | W |
| - | |
| But the stars burn on overhead | G |
| Unconscious of final ends | X |
| As I walk home to bed | G |
| Asking what judgment waits | Y |
| My person all my friends | X |
| And these United States | Y |
W. H. Auden
(1)
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About A Walk After Dark
A Walk After Dark is a poem by W. H. Auden. This page includes the poem text, poet information, related topics, comments, and similar poems.
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