The Beautiful Mixture of Devastation and Misery in Auden's Funeral Blues

Funeral Blues, a morose but beautifully composed poem by W.H. Auden is a mixture of indignancy and despair. The title itself refers to a funeral, a piercing silence, heavy with languor. Auden's poem speaks to the idea of how death impacts those left behind. The title is very unsparing of the contents of the poem thus emphasizing the overall grievous setting. There are two different versions of this poem and the first one being published in 1936. The first version is a burlesque variant for political leader. The poem is separated into 4 stanzas. The first two stanzas include someone mourning the loss of a loved one whilst making sequences of demands, for instance, asking for the clocks to be stopped and the music of the pianos to be discontinued. The idea of stopping clocks serves two purposes here. Silencing the ticking sound they make but also stopping time. When someone dies their time is up and “Stop the clocks” perfectly represents that. However, “Stop all the clocks” isn’t a figure of speech, but an old-fashioned custom at funerals. It was thought to be bad luck if a clock was ticking during a funeral as it could indicate another death. Alternately let the muffled drums — historically affiliated with funerals — join the coffin as the mourners come. Reasons why the poet would’ve wanted the noise to be silenced could partly be because he needed time and the tranquility to grieve but also because such commotion is a reminder that the world beyond you carries on. The poem appears to be from the perspective of a man — seemingly the poet himself — profoundly lamenting the loss of a lover. In this stanza, Auden brings up noise once again. This time he describes the noise of the aeroplanes moaning overhead. He doesn’t want to confine to having a small, private funeral, he wants the loss of his lover writ large.

He wants doves to be decked with crêpe bows and traffic policemen are to wear black cotton gloves. Wearing black gloves would be a sign of respect to the departed. In spite of that, his lover’s passing, a seemingly normal man, won’t be commemorated and subsequently forgotten. Therefore, the poem is interlaced with hyperbole to convey just how important his mourning is. In the next line, he requests the doves to wear bows which could suggest that the poet’s pain is overwhelming. Doves are a very mighty symbol, particularly in religion, and they represent purity and peace. In the third stanza, the opening line references the points of a compass being the deceased effectively says that the poet is lacking direction without their loved one. It suggests they are lost without them. He referred to his lover as his North, South, East and West, obviously, the deceased isn’t a compass but it’s a metaphor. It’s the poet’s way of pointing out how important this person way to him. By saying they have lost their talk and their song, he’s bringing back the recurring theme of noise throughout the poem. He thought his lover would always be around, but ending the stanza with three gut-wrenching word: “I was wrong”. This assertion reminds me death and how it would hit us all, regardless who. The poem shows many emotions- including but not limited to grief, love, remembrance, and depression.

The poet speaks highly of their recently deceased lover. The rhyming scheme in this poem is relatively simple with the last word of a line rhyming with the preceding line.Lastly, the fourth stanza contains even more hyperbole. But his extreme, hyperbolic commands are his expressions of his extreme grief. Auden’s last stanza speaks to what reality becomes when a loved one departs. The imagery employed in the last stanza represents elements of the world, for example, the luminous nature of the stars, the stately presence of the moon, the illuminating warmth of the sun, and the fluid beauty of the ocean. This last stanza is important because it speaks to how the shared consciousness of the external world is fundamentally altered when part of that shared consciousness is removed, leaving the survivor as one who no longer lives life, but merely exists.