 In accordance with Auden’s “Prologue,” the poem begins with four lonely individuals (three men and one woman) in a bar, each reflecting on his or her own disquietude while acknowledging the presence of the others.Musically, a plaintive clarinet duet signals the beginning of the characters’ journey, with a long descending scale signaling their retreat to a shared unconscious.It is here that the characters begin discussing life in each of their own points of view, moving onto “The Seven Ages.” Here, Bernstein composed a set of variations that are unique in the fact that, rather than all sharing the same melody or thematic material like a traditional theme and variations would, each variation plays on the material from the variation immediately before it.