| Template: Leonardo Flores Course Site Last updated Aug 20, 2010 4:15 PM I created this site as a type of course management system for my Modern Poetry class (English 3325). The site will develop as the semester goes along, but this is a solid start towards a course website. Enjoy! Prof. Leonardo Flores Department of English UPR: Mayagüez Campus | Use this template

## Modern Poetry | Search this site

Student Blogs‎ > ‎Jaymar Velazquez‎ > ‎ ### Lexical Analysis: Who's Who by W.H. Auden posted Feb 22, 2010 1:59 AM by Jaymar Velazquez Ortiz
W. H. Auden is an interesting poet who gives poems a different touch. In his work, some of them have connotations that may seem to have certain meaning and also have another meaning. Who’s Who is one of those poems that you could interpret with two different perspectives. W. H Auden, using accurate adjectives and verbs makes the poem full of images in a dual interpretation. In the first stanza the first word that causes this double interpretation is “Father”. This word is the one that changes the perspectives. First the poem sounds like if it’s about an experience with a father and describing how this paternal figure is when you see images like when it says in the first stanza 5th verse, “Of how he fought, fished, hunted, worked all night,”. This line really makes you see a resemblance of a father. Another image of a father is in the second stanza line 3 where it says; “Did little jobs about the house with skill” where father is supposed to do little jobs on a house. The real ambiguity is in the second line of the first stanza where it says “How Father beat him”. You can deduce this is like if someone was talking about a father (paternal figure) doing something to someone or to a child. Looking at Auden’s biography and tendency of writing in a prayer style the other way we can also interpret that this is about a Father from a church. In conclusion the poem makes you see it has a dual interpretation. The use of sound of certain words reinforce the fact that it’s a about a paternal figure. Some other lines like when it says “what acts Made him the greatest figure of his day” firms to another point. The poem also has other lines that could be misplace with different meanings.
### Comments (1) _displayNameOrEmail_ - _time_ - Remove _text_ Leonardo L Flores - Mar 10, 2010 9:14 AM Your essay is really focused on that word choice, and builds nicely around it, but I wish you had gone further and used metaphor theory to do so.

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