By: Quinn Forlini
I’m fascinated with the way that poetry can manipulate time: making a moment slow or
quicken, making the past come alive again, and holding multiple timelines at once. The aubade is
a poetic form that allows for a meditative state and wide emotional range precisely because of
the time restraint that it imposes. As the form has changed from its original parameters from
medieval France—originating as a song to a sleeping woman after spending the night together—
the only real restriction of the form today is that it takes place at the arrival of dawn. The fact that
the aubade is defined as occurring at “the arrival of the dawn,” as opposed to dawn itself, is
important—this arrival is a moment of transition, from darkness to light, suspended between
night and day, neither here or there, containing both and neither (Poetry Foundation). The poetic
moment of the aubade holds a beginning and an ending, and so it seems to stand in for a larger
human understanding of time. The sky and human consciousness shift alongside one another,
connecting the human state with the natural world. This multiplicity could be why the aubade is
defined as a poem either “welcoming or lamenting” this arrival: across aubades, there are wide
tonal, emotional, and lyrical differences, and aubades often contain elements of both celebration
and mourning (Poetry Foundation). What other form can hold so many oppositions and
contradictions in its very definition? There is something about the limitations of when the aubade
can take place that force these poems to hold a keen awareness of temporality. This suspension of
a moment makes daybreak—and aubades—at once ordinary and magical, definitive and fleeting,
and valuable to poetry.
As a poem that contains a simultaneous beginning and ending, I am particularly
interested in how aubades begin and end—and how they do this with a self-awareness of the
limited time that they exist within. In Philip Larkin’s “Aubade,” one of the most famous
contemporary American examples of the form, the speaker begins by orienting himself in where
he is in time, creating a scene fixated on the importance of the moment: “Waking at four to
soundless dark, I stare” (Larkin l. 2). The speaker finds it necessary to note the time of night, and
acknowledges that “[i]n time the curtain-edges will grow light,” showing his awareness of the
moment’s fleeting nature, and adds that “Till then I see what’s really always there: / Unresting
death, a whole day nearer now” (Larkin ll. 3, 4-5). The speaker’s awareness of time facilitates an
awareness of consciousness, and just as he knows that the night will end, he also acknowledges
that his own ability to “see what’s really always there” will end as well. In the first few lines, the
poem creates a liminal and urgent space that enables the speaker to meditate on death, as he is
aware that his very ability to consider death in this way will end soon. He must capture the
moment now; there is no other time.
In Lynda Hull’s “Aubade,” the speaker similarly orients herself by noting the exact time
in the first line, saying “Below the viaduct, the 5:05’s stiff wind snares / the whole block in its
backlash” (ll. 1-2). The speaker believes that “the morning fairly aches with promise,” and this
seems to be true because the morning has not happened yet. In the way that approaching dawn
facilitates meditation in Larkin’s “Aubade,” Hull’s speaker implies that the time of day allows
for a unique human connection: “only / insomniacs are out, the million-dollar dreamers … What
joins me to my neighbor is this // silent complicity” (Hull ll. 3-4, 5-6). Although the speaker and
the neighbor never have an explicit interaction in the course of the poem, this time that they are
both awake and in one another’s presence prompts the speaker to meditate on connection,
loneliness, and isolation in a way that most likely wouldn’t be acknowledged at all in the middle
of a bright and bustling day. As the speaker watches the neighbor doing calisthenics on his fire
escape, the neighbor’s loneliness seems to reflect the speaker’s own loneliness, which is never
directly stated: “A month ago [my neighbor] came home / to an empty flat and that emptiness
turns / its dull blade inside his chest” (Hull ll. 9-11). The speaker uses the distance of the
neighbor to delve into this kind of painful emptiness, and the ability to acknowledge this seems
possible because of the quiet emptiness of this time of day, and the fact that it will end.
Hull’s speaker admits that “It’s easy / to understand, at times like this, the sudden / desire
to commend oneself into the hands / of sympathetic strangers” (Hull ll. 15-18). Again, the
speaker is aware that it’s “times like this” that enable understanding, which allows the poem to
provide an understanding of the time itself, later observing how the neighbor “touches toes / until
the fog rolls down the hill like a memory / that wants losing” (Hull ll. 34-36). The speaker’s
observations of the neighbor become conflated not only with the self and the meditation, but with
the time of day. Similarly, in Larkin’s aubade, the speaker’s description of the state of being dead
appears to also reflect the state of being suspended between day and night, in the way that all
aubades are: “Not to be here, / Not to be anywhere, / And soon; nothing more terrible, nothing
more true” (ll. 18-20). The self-awareness of the speaker seems to spread in the aubade, allowing
for an all-knowing quality to the voice. Both Larkin’s and Hull’s aubades reach moments of
certainty and clarity, in which the speakers make encompassing and confident statements. Hull’s
speaker declares, “This business of being human / should not be such a lonely proposition” (ll.
25-26). In Larkin’s aubade, the speaker makes strings of these kinds of assertions, including
“Courage is no good: / It means not scaring others. Being brave / Lets no one off the grave. /
Death is no different whined at than withstood” (ll. 37-40). The speakers’ sense of authority
regarding matters of uncertainty seems to increase as each of these aubades unfold, as if the fact
that the clock is running out on the acknowledged limitation of time heightens the poem’s ability
to make its meditative claims.
The matter-of-fact and exacting tone of Larkin’s and Hull’s aubades is also present in
Gwendolyn Brooks’ “An Aspect of Love, Alive in the Ice and Fire.” This aubade explores the
arrival of dawn in a more traditional context, as a time when two lovers must say goodbye to one
another as their night together is ending. The poem recognizes the temporality of the moment
immediately, as with Larkin’s and Hull’s aubades, opening with “In a package of minutes there is
this We” (Brooks l. 1). Right away the poem is controlled by a “package of minutes” that has to
end. Brooks’ aubade exemplifies the simultaneity of the speaker’s shift in consciousness with the
shift of the outside world from night to morning. In the opening stanza, the lovers are laughing
and touching, but then are interrupted because “A physical light is in the room” (Brooks 6). After
daylight emerges and interrupts the lovers, the speaker suggests a causal relationship between the
arrival of dawn and the lovers’ state of being and connection to one another: “Because the world
is at the window / we cannot wonder very long” (Brooks 7-8). It is important that the moment of
wonder is going to end but has not ended yet, because suddenly, in the awareness and
acknowledgement that the wonder will end soon, the wonder itself becomes urgent. In fact, it
seems that the poem’s wonder would not be possible without the fact that the speaker recognizes
that it will not last “very long”; it is the speakers’ awareness of the limitation of time that allows
for the poem’s meditative space. The speaker begins to observe the lover in this new “physical
light” and transforms him with the comparison that he is “direct and self-accepting as a lion / in
Afrikan velvet” (Brooks ll. 13-14). It is only when the speaker knows that her sense of wonder
will end imminently, that the wonder itself seems to truly begin.
The recognition of the dawn’s new light offers a turning point in the aubades by Hull and
Larkin as well, further suggesting that the external control of time directly engages and impacts
the poems’ speakers. In the first half of Hull’s aubade, the speaker describes the early-morning
street as “washed in black and white, / jittery as a sixteen-millimeter reel,” suggesting that
nothing in the world is visually clear or definitive yet, in turn making meditative definability
possible for the speaker (ll. 14-15). Later, the speaker again describes the outside world as the
light begins to emerge: “My neighbor / crawls back through his window … and above // the
plummeting alley, a sleek gray seam of sky” (ll. 40-43). The temporal space is coming to a close,
and the sky is easily described as a “seam,” suggesting definable edges. In Larkin’s poem, the
speaker acknowledges the light just as he acknowledges the “soundless dark” in the opening of
the poem, now stating that, “Slowly light strengthens, and the room takes shape” (ll. 41-42). This
speaker also turns to the sky, describing it as “white as clay, with no sun” (l. 48). For both poems,
this recognition of light and a visually definable space shifts the focus from an isolated self to the
outside world, placing the self in a larger context.
All three of these aubades end with this outward turn to the world beyond the self, while
also remaining inside the liminal space, the “package of minutes,” that they establish initially.
In other words, each poem uses restraint even in this widening of scope, never completely
immersing itself in the outside world or reaching the point of pure day, but nevertheless
identifying the day’s inevitable and fast-approaching arrival. In Larkin’s aubade, the objects in
the world feel pregnant with purpose; nothing is happening yet but the speaker’s awareness of
the precise way things will occur escalates the suspension of the moment as it ends. He writes,
“telephones crouch, getting ready to ring / In locked-up offices, and all the uncaring intricate
rented world begins to rouse” (ll. 45-47). Hull’s aubade offers a similar rhetorical structure at the
same point as the Larkin poem does, when Hull’s speaker says, “Pretty soon deals will go down
all over the city. / The fruit vendor will appear singing strawberries / and watermelons. From
their tanks, lobsters / in the seafood markets will wave pincers” (ll. 44-47). The listing and vivid
imagery of these lines seems to make the outside world in each of these poems come to life, and
yet the scenes exist in a speculative space. Although both speakers know the predictable patterns
of the both the natural and human worlds around them, the careful attention to tense and
language gives a miraculous—if not necessarily welcomed—sensibility to the oncoming day.
Brooks’ poem comes the closest to fully engaging with the new day, as it follows the
speaker and her lover to the street, where they smile, then “go / in different directions / down the
imperturbable street” (ll. 22-24). But the poem remains in the liminal space of the “we,” ending
just as the lovers separate. The lovers seem to be swallowed by the “imperturbable street” in its
very non-reaction; the outside world does not embody the pain or sorrow of the lovers parting—
rather, the street absorbs whatever emotion they might feel. By turning to the inanimate and
unfazed street, the poem does not allow space for the emotions of the day or the parting itself.
Instead, as an aubade, the poem is interested in the moment before the arrival of dawn, before the
light is in the room, when things are temporarily vague and undefined. The speaker returns to
this temporal moment just before the final stanza, and tries to articulate it now that it’s ending:
“There is a moment in Camaraderie / when interruption is not to be understood / … This is the
shining joy; / the time of not-to-end” (Brooks 16-17, 19-20). Within the poem’s hyper awareness
of time, it reaches a paradox: how can this moment of camaraderie be defined as “the time of
not-to-end” when the very tension that began the poem was that this moment was going to end?
The speaker tries to explain the moment of presence that the lovers experienced before
dawn, but only feels the urgency to express this after the experience has passed—since, of
course, she was too present in the moment to reflect or meditate on it while it was happening.
Perhaps in the meditative state of the aubade it is possible to have an awareness of time, but there
remains an incommunicable aspect to the form because there cannot be a simultaneous
awareness of time and presence within time. When the light inevitably comes again in Larkin’s
poem, the speaker recognizes—fleetingly—that along with the room taking shape, something
else “stands plain as a wardrobe”: “what we know / Have always known, know that we can’t
escape, / Yet can’t accept” (Larkin ll. 42, 42-44). This references both the smaller passage of time
from one day into another and our larger mortality. The aubade can contain both scopes at once
because the concept of time ultimately remains a mystery—allowing room for multiplicity—
even while the aubade works to make sense of its passage. As all of these aubades attempt to
express what’s inexpressible, they reach a place of strangeness in which time starts to become
unrecognizable. At the end of Hull’s aubade, time and the outside world become impossible and
unreadable, as perceived by the speaker thinking about the future of the day: “lobsters / in the
seafood markets will wave pincers as if / imploring the broken factory clock that registers // 9:99
in the morning, 0° even in the heart of summer” (Hull ll. 46-48). It’s not that the speaker has lost
her awareness of time, but that through the meditative state of the aubade she’s reached an
understanding beyond how we normally measure the phenomena of the natural world. “9:99 in
the morning” indicates that the speaker can no longer use the language she used in the beginning
of the poem to talk about time, or maybe that the traditional way of telling time is meaningless in
this moment, in the same way that the speaker in Brooks’ poem tries to describe the moment of
joy with her lover as “the time of not-to-end.”
Yet nothing feels especially clarified, particularly because, although we knew it was
coming, it’s difficult to accept that the temporal meditative state is passing. In the final line of
Hull’s poem, there is an uncertain and almost desperate tone to the voice when she says,
“Answer me. What am I to make of these signs?” (Hull l. 50). In this last moment between
what’s ending and what’s beginning, the speaker tries to find sense and order in the world again.
She attempts this by evoking human connection in the demand or plea to someone or something
unknown to us: “Answer me.” The address evokes a human connection and something larger
than oneself, although no answer is given. The openness of this ending captures the potential of
the aubade’s range, which is possible because it pushes us even though we know exactly where
it’s going. Within the package of minutes that the form allows, the aubade leads us to the brink of
understanding, and just when we think we’re about to uncover the complexity of human emotion,
it becomes day.
Quinn Forlini holds an MFA in poetry from the University of Virginia and a BA from Ursinus College, where she now teaches creative writing. She was a finalist for the 2018 Backwaters Press Prize, and her recent work has appeared or is forthcoming in The Greensboro Review, The Journal, and the Fourth River. She lives in Phoenixville, PA.
Works Cited
Brooks, Gwendolyn. “An Aspect of Love, Alive in the Ice and Fire.” Poetry Foundation.
Web.
“Glossary Terms: Aubade.” Poetry Foundation. Web.
Hull, Lynda. “Aubade.” Star ledger: poems. Iowa City: U of Iowa Press, 1991. Print.
Larkin, Philip. “Aubade.” Poetry Foundation. Web.