Many poets have used the form of a villanelle to express their feelings and ideas: Elizabeth Bishop used it to advise on the art of losing; Oscar Wilde used it to inform about Theocritus; Sylvia Plath used it to give admonitions to her readers. Though the villanelle is a fairly rigid structure having strict rules of rhyme, meter, and repetition, it can be utilized to bring depth and beauty to a meaning or idea. In W.H. Auden's poem, "If I Could Tell You," he uses the formal elements of the villanelle to contribute to his central theme of the fickleness and ravages of time: the slight variations on the mostly iambic pentameter, the repetition of certain lines, the rhyme pattern of repeated masculine sounds, and the overall structure of five tercets and a quatrain all work together to show that while time affects everyone and everything, it will give no hints nor help to the inevitable processes of life, especially death.
             A villanelle is typically a poem of fixed meter; and although this poem is primarily in iambic pentameter, there do exist a few lines that employ the use of dactyls. "Time will say nothing but I told you so," the first line of the poem, has an unusual metric pattern of two dactyls and two iambs; "Time only knows the price we have to pay," the second line, uses a dactyl, a trochee, a dactyl, and an iamb. These two lines begin with a stressed syllable to emphasize the word "time," and the continued variation on meter reflects the unpredictability of time: even though time is frequently viewed as a steady, stable, predictable thing, Auden mixes up the metric pattern to show that time is fickle and changing and undependable. The first line, as it is repeated throughout the poem, continues to provide contrast and variation to the otherwise steady iambic pentameter, insinuating that throughout life, time remains varying and almost untrustworthy-it will say nothing about why we ...