Aubade with Traffic
By Noor Halabi · · 5 min read
An aubade is a dawn poem: two lovers, the coming light, and the argument that the night should last longer. The form runs from the troubadours through Donne and Larkin. "Aubade with Traffic" keeps the argument and moves it to a bus route.
The title tells you the whole strategy. The oldest romantic form in European poetry, plus the noise of a city getting to work.
The soft hour
"Even the city keeps one soft hour, / before the street clears its throat and begins." The verb is perfect: a street clearing its throat is a city about to speak all day. Before that, there is a window of quiet that anyone who has been awake at five in the morning has stood inside.
The word "even" is doing the persuasion. If the city can be gentle, so can the person being addressed.
A bus that breathes like a horse
The second couplet pairs a mechanical image with an animal one — air brakes exhaling like a horse — then follows it with "Somebody's window gives up its blue." Dawn is described as a surrender rather than an arrival, which keeps the poem's sympathies with the night.
The plea, and the unsigned day
"Stay. The day is only a rumor so far, / a list of errands the light hasn't signed." This is the traditional aubade plea updated into bureaucracy: the day has not been authorised yet, so it does not legally exist. It is a joke and a genuine request at once.
How to leave, according to this poem
The ending gives the poem its lasting line: "When you go, go the way the dark goes: / slowly, and leaving everything visible." Darkness does not depart by hiding things — it leaves the world more legible than it found it.
As instructions for ending anything, a night or a relationship, it is hard to improve on. That final couplet is why this aubade gets quoted far outside the context of the morning it describes.
Frequently asked questions
- What is an aubade?
- A poem set at dawn, traditionally spoken by one lover to another as the light arrives and they must part. It is one of the oldest forms in European lyric poetry.
- How does "Aubade with Traffic" change the form?
- It keeps the dawn setting and the plea to stay, but replaces pastoral imagery with buses, windows and street noise, making the classical form work in a modern city.
- What does the last line mean?
- Darkness leaves gradually and reveals rather than conceals as it goes. The speaker asks for a departure with the same quality: slow, and honest about what it leaves behind.
Themes in this poem
- aubade poem
- city poetry
- poems about morning
- urban poem
- poems about leaving at dawn