If I Could Tell You, By William Shakespeare

Fate and Its Knowability The idea of one knowing one’s fate before it happens has been seen throughout literature. For example, in the play "The Tragedy of Macbeth," Macbeth is given a look into his fate from the witches who had plagued him earlier. However, despite being given an idea of his fate, he was not told exactly how it would happen, showing that even when one knows his fate partially, only a divine or all-knowing being such as God, the leader of the witches, or an abstract concept such as time, can know one's fate. In W. H. Auden's poem, "If I Could Tell You," Auden uses the poem’s villanelle structure, and a few poetic devices in order to demonstrate to the reader that one’s fate is often uncertain. By using a personification
One such image is of a hypothetical situation of weeping "when clowns put on their show" (line 4). Such a situation shows how someone is doing an action contrary to what would traditionally be happening when they see a clown's show, something which is supposed to make him laugh. This image is similar to the image in the very next line when the narrator describes how some may "stumble when musicians play" (line 5). This idea is very similar to the previous idea of contraries, because typically when a musician plays one would be dancing rather than stumbling along. This is significant because in a later line it is said that the personified "Time" will say "I told you so" (line 6), indicating to the reader that Time had already known what would happen during these moments and that one will not always know whether they will laugh or cry when going to a clown show. Despite this observation, Time still knows about the future and is able to with its foresight to say "I told you so" (line 6). Yet another image occurs later in the poem, where "[t]he winds must come from somewhere when they blow" and that "[t]here must be reasons why the leaves decay" (line 10). Of course now people know the reasons the wind blows and the leaves decay, but one cannot truly predict when they shall blow, only that they are coming. Even then, when people know if such an event will happen, there is no certainty - much in the same way that the weather is just a prediction rather than a fact. The speaker faces a position where Time knows the answer and he does not, yet again indicating that one cannot always know one’s fate, much in the same way that one cannot know the weather. Lastly, there is the image of the lions getting up and going, in addition to the brooks and soldiers running away from the