W. H. Auden

Auden's "The Capital" critically examines the artificiality and harsh reality of city life, emphasizing the exploitation and conformity forced upon its inhabitants. It uses emotive language to...

W. H. Auden's poem "O What Is That Sound" is a ballad that uses a conversational structure between two speakers to build tension and suspense. The poem reflects themes of betrayal and impending doom,...

Some themes in W. H. Auden's poetry are suffering and the dehumanization of modern life. Famous examples of poems exploring these themes are "Musee des Beaux Arts" and “The Shield of Achilles."

In "Partition," Auden uses his typical poetic sensibility of dry humor and irony to critique the arrogance of the British ruling class revealed in their partition of India in 1947.

W. H. Auden's poem "Dear, Though the Night is Gone" explores themes of love and separation, emphasizing the enduring nature of true affection despite physical absence. "At the Manger" reflects on the...

In "Seascape," W. H. Auden presents a simple scene of cliffs, the surf, and the sea, but he enhances the scene through irregular lines and rhymes and through poetic and linguistic devices like vivid...

In "The Managers," Auden compares ordinary life in postwar Britain to being like an insect working in a large, institutional system that strips life of poetry or grandeur.

W. H. Auden's "Mundus et Infans" humorously explores the parallels between a baby and a tyrant. Yet the poem, written during World War II, also carries the more serious message that the seeds of...

"O, Where Are You Going?" by W. H. Auden explores themes of fear, mortality, and the human journey towards death. The poem uses dark imagery to convey a sense of impending doom and reflects the...

To annotate Auden's "Spain," note that it was written during the Spanish Civil War with an anti-fascist stance. Focus on literary techniques like parallelism with "Yesterday" and enumeratio with...

Auden employs various literary techniques in "O Where Are You Going?" including alliteration and personification. Alliteration, the repetition of consonant sounds, is heavily used, creating a...

The last stanza of "The Average" by W. H. Auden reveals the boy's realization that he cannot escape his true self, symbolized by his shadow. Despite trying to outrun his perceived mediocrity and live...

W.H. Auden's poem "On This Island" employs free verse, lacking a regular meter or rhyme scheme, although some lines have a loose rhyme pattern and mostly iambic meter with varying stresses. The poem...

In the final stanza, Auden hopes that "the full view" of the natural scene he describes will deeply impact the "stranger," enriching their life through memory. He uses vivid imagery, emphasizing...

The key images in Auden's "The Average" are highly effective, particularly the opening image of "peasant parents" who toil for their child's future, symbolizing parental sacrifice. The "stingy soil"...

The form of W.H. Auden's poem "O Where are You Going?" complements its content through its dialectic structure, which contrasts pessimism with optimism. The first three stanzas present a dark,...

"A shot from crag to crag,The tell-tale echoes trundle;Some feathered he-or-she[...]Postpones his dying with a dishOf several suffocated fish." It is always difficult, if not actually impossible, to...