Answer to Question #186346 in English for mike

Question

Another Time (W.H Auden)

For us like any other fugitive,

Like the numberless flowers that cannot number

And all the beasts that need not remember,

It is today in which we live.

So many try to say Not Now,

So many have forgotten how

To say I Am, and would be

Lost, if they could, in history.

Bowing, for instance, with such old-world grace

To a proper flag in a proper place,

Muttering like ancients as they stump upstairs

Of Mine and His or Ours and Theirs.

Just as if time were what they used to will

When it was gifted with possession still,

Just as if they were wrong

In no more wishing to belong.

Analyse the Literary Devices of this poem :

1) Alliteration

2) Assonance

3) Enjambment

4) Metaphor

5) Oxymoron

6) Personification

7) Simile

Answer 1

1) Alliteration- stanza one numberless-number and stanza three proper-place.

2) Assonance- stanza one number-remember, stanza three grace-place, stanza four will-still.

3) Enjambment- in stanza two line two is a broken line and is completed in line three. So many have forgotten how/ To say I am.

4) Metaphor- Muttering like ancients as they stump upstairs

5) Oxymoron- Lost, if they could, in history. This statement is contradictory as one cannot be lost in history. History always remembers.

6) Personification- in stanza four just as if time were what they use to will when it was gifted with possession. Time is given the human attribute of possession.

7) Simile- For us like any other fugitive, like the numberless flowers that cannot number. A fugitive is compared to a numberless flower.