17 pages • 34 minutes read
If I Could Tell You
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Literary Devices
Form and Meter
“If I Could Tell You” follows the form of a lyric known as a villanelle. It contains 19 lines divided up into six stanzas. The first five stanzas contain three lines each, known as a tercet, while the sixth and final stanza contains four lines, known as a quatrain. The poem features two key refrains, “Time will say nothing but I told you so” (Lines 1, 6, 12, 18) and “If I could tell you I would let you know” (Lines 3, 9, 15, 19)—these refrains are also a key feature of the villanelle form. The poem contains only two rhyme sounds, and its rhyme scheme is ABA ABA ABA ABA ABA ABAA. The refrains and the limited rhyme scheme create a tightly-constructed poem, enabling the poet to foreground the poem’s key themes and images through repetition.
Personification
The poem’s speaker personifies time as “Time” throughout the poem. Personification is used to attribute human qualities to abstract or nonhuman elements, such as nature, love, or, in the case of “If I Could Tell You,” time itself. In using personification, Auden further dramatizes the human condition, representing humans as being at the mercy of this unstoppable, dominant force that reveals no meaning for existence and which remains indifferent in the face of human suffering.
Alliteration, Assonance, and Consonance
These three literary devices all emphasize the sound of language and contribute to the poem's musicality and mood. Alliteration is the repetition of a sound at the beginning of two or more words. Assonance (the repetition of vowel sounds) and consonance (the repetition of consonant sounds) can appear in any part of a word, not just at the beginning. Alliteration is present in “weep when” (Line 4) and “roses really” (Line 13). A few examples of assonance are “[…] I told you so, / Time only knows […]” (Lines 1-2); “There are no fortunes to be told, although” (Line 7); and “There must be reasons why the leaves decay” (Line 11). Consonance appears in “The winds must come from somewhere when they blow” (Line 10) and “The vision seriously intends to stay” (Line 14).
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