An Analysis of W. H. Auden’s Poetry Based on Register Theory: A Case Study of Thank You, Fog

This paper applies the register theory from Systemic Functional Linguistics to analyze the poem Thank You, Fog from W.H. Auden’s poetry collection of the same name, examining the poem from the perspectives of field of discourse, tenor of discourse and mode of discourse. A conclusion can be achieved that these three aspects are primarily reflected in the poem’s lexical choices, syntactic structures and rhetorical devices. Furthermore, it reveals the aesthetic value and theme of the poem, thereby demonstrating the applicability of register theory in analyzing this poem.