Literary Analysis of Funeral Blues by W. H. Auden

The term ‘literary canon’ refers to any books, narratives and poems considered to be the most persuasive pieces of a particular time period or place. For instance take the 19th century American literacy, it is generally the exposure to a version of a group of texts that has been established as representative of the essential movements, changes and historical events in America during the 1800s.

W. H. Auden’s poem ‘Stop all the clocks’, also known as ‘Funeral Blues’, was originally written in 1983, however an early version was published in 1936, but the poem in its final, familiar form was first published in The Year's Poetry in 1938. The poem was brought to a whole new audience when it was quoted in full in the 1994 film Four Weddings and a Funeral.

W.H Auden was an English poet, playwright, critic, and librettist. Wystan Hugh Auden exerted a major influence on the poetry of the 20th century. Auden went on to win the Pulitzer Prize in 1948 for The Age of Anxiety, a universally agreed masterpiece. His poetry usually relates to moral issues and evidences a strong political, social, and psychological context. Auden’s poetry is considered versatile and inventive and incorporated a vast range of scientific knowledge. Today he is considered one of the most skilled poets who regularly wrote in traditional rhyme and meter.

Funeral Blues is divided into four stanzas. The first two stanzas focuse on the mourning of a loss of a close friend. In the first stanza the speaker asks that the clocks be stopped, the telephone be cut off so it cannot ring, the dog be kept quiet with a bone to gnaw, and the stopping of the pianos being played. However to let the muffled drumbeats, accompany the coffin as it is brought out and the mourners of funeral arrive. During a funeral it is common those don’t want to be disturbed by the noise of the world, partly because you need time to grieve and to remind you of the life such person had. The requests the speaker makes are paving the way for the funeral.

In the second stanza, the requests differ. He goes on to ask that the planes circle in the sky, writing out a simple yet strong message in skywriting (first used for advertising purposes by the Daily Mail in 1922, just over a decade before Auden wrote ‘Funeral Blues’). The message stating ‘He Is Dead’ be scribbled across the sky. The crepe bows he desires to place around the necks of the public doves suggests that the speaker’s grief is overwhelming. This makes it seem as he wants the rest of the world to mourn with him in peace. This is shown as the bows round the necks of the doves, and the black cotton gloves with black being associated with mourning.

The third stanza makes it’s clear that the man who has died was everything to the speaker. The dead man was the speaker’s life, he was a guide and someone so very close to the speaker. This suggests that the speaker is talking about more than a friend even, and is dreading the loss of a lover. Auden himself was gay and the idea that the poem is a knell by a male poet for a dead male lover. At the time this poem was written that state of sexuality would have be around upon amongst the community and various religions. The speaker thought that his lover would always be around, but with three simple words, heartbreakingly delivered at the end of the stanza ‘I was wrong.’

The final stanza then takes a number of romantic analogies that are typically associated with poetry such as the stars, the moon, the sun and the oceans. As with the previous stanza, the power of Auden’s poetry in this stanza lies in the contrast between this catalogues first three lines and the final line with simplicity yet heart felt emotion. But mentioning these poetic tropes has a dual purpose, as well as rejecting the usefulness of such romantic talk in the face of his grief, the speaker is also saying that the world is of no worth if it does not have his lover in it.

Rick Rylance, a British literacy scholar, has recently noted in his poetic informative novel ‘Literature and the Public Good’, “the poem taken so sincerely to the hearts of many people was, in origin, a piss-take.” However it has still become a meaningful and heartfelt piece of text that displays grief to thousands of readers from the mind of one lover to another.