W. H. Auden was born February 21, 1907, in York, England. One of his most noted poems is "Funeral Blues," which was featured in the movie Four Weddings and a Funeral.
Auden’s “Funeral Blues” is also known as “Stop all the Clocks,” and it is the first poem in a duo titled “Two Songs for Hedli Anderson.” Many contemporary poetry lovers and movie lovers will remember that the poem was recited in the film Four Weddings and a Funeral.
The poem consists of four rimed stanzas. Each stanza follows the rime scheme, AABB; in other words, each stanza is made up of two rimed couples. The poem is easily accessible; the main poetic device is hyperbole or exaggeration.
First Stanza: “Stop all the clocks, cut off the telephone”
In the first stanza, the speaker, who is a mourner, begins his extended exaggerated grievance by commanding that all the clocks stop, and all the telephones be “cut off.” He even wants to quiet “the dog from barking”—the dog with “a juicy bone.”
He then commands piano players to stop playing and begin a funeral dirge with a “muffled drum.” Finally, in the last line of the first stanza, it becomes clear why the speaker wants everything to stop; everything seems to have stopped for him because his loved one has died: “Bring out the coffin, let the mourners come.”
Second Stanza: “Let aeroplanes circle moaning overhead”
Next, the speaker/mourner expresses a wish that an airplane fly overhead and write a message in the sky: “He is Dead.” He wants “crêpe bows” placed around the “white necks of the public doves.” And he wants to white gloves of the policemen to be replaced with black ones.
The speaker is giving a ridiculous face to the world, because he feels so off-balance himself. He wants the world to reflect how he is feeling, and so he calls for everything and everyone to take on a mourner’s reality.
Third Stanza: “He was my North, my South, my East and West”
In the third stanza, the speaker declaims how important the deceased was to him: he was every direction, every day of the week, every time of day. The speaker/mourner insists that the deceased was “my talk, my song”—his necessary speech as well as his entertainment.
The speaker then baldly asserts, “I thought that love would last forever, I was wrong.” Because the speaker has invested so much of himself in this other person, he is finding himself at a total loss. He is utterly vanquished emotionally.
Fourth Stanza: “The stars are not wanted now; put out every one”
The saddest exaggeration is portrayed in the final stanza: the speaker now is calling for the end of everything. He wants the stars to stop shining. He wants the moon and the sun to be put out. He wants the ocean to be “pour[ed] away,” and he wants the “wood” to be swept up. For him the world no longer exists, and his despair makes him feel that “nothing now can ever come to any good.”
Although the poem is easily accessible, the construction is quite clever, and even though the speaker is calling for the impossible, it is his deeply felt emotion that makes the reader understand and appreciate his anguish, as the reader also enjoys the execution of the expression.
