In If I Could Tell You, a villanelle poem, by W. H. Auden, time is introduced to the reader as an unreliable person. This characteristic of Time given by the speaker is embroidered in the poem through various poetical devices such as personification, repetition and juxtaposed imagery. It can be inferred from the third tercet that the speaker apostrophes to his lover. The poetical devices in this poem serve to intensify the conflict between the speaker's desire to inform his lover of the future and the unexpected nature of Time.

The personification of time is the major element in this poem to deliver the reader that time is unreliable. In each line the word time is capitalized; this converts the concept of time into Time as a person with a special name. "Time will say nothing but I told you so." The first line is important since this...