Essay Funeral Blues WH Auden

"Funeral Blues" was written by the British modernist poet W.H. Auden one of the most famous and influent of the 20th century and first published in 1938 in "The Year's Poetry". Auden’s poetry is characterized for its engagement with politics, love, moral and religion and its variety in form, tone and contents. In addition to his poems, Auden has written plays and films. Funeral Blues is an elegy, a poem that could be sung as a tribute to a deceased person which includes several themes such as grief, isolation and death. It evokes the deepness of grief. Funeral blues is composed of four quatrains of four stanzas each consisting of two rhyming couplets known as heroic couplets all strong. It is written in iambic hexameter but with great irregularity.

The question is to know how Auden manages to share his feelings through this poem.

The main points that will be considered are how the author experiences isolation of grief, then what the deceased meant to him.

First of all, the poem begins with the imperative form and urgent requests. The speaker wants to stop "the clocks," to turn off the "telephone"(l.1) , to give the dog a "juicy bone" (l.2) to keep it from barking, and to "silence the pianos" (l.3) these requests are symbolic. By asking to "stop all the clocks" Auden ask to literally stop the time, which, at the same time, refer to the time running out before the death of a person." The telephone " represents our ability to express ourselves with those around us but also our way of communicating with ourselves we can therefore deduce that the author is completely isolated, that he is unable to express himself with those around him. . " The pianos " represents the festivity. The author asks for a moment of calm, serenity without movements. Then the author seems to leave us a bit of freedom with "Let'' line 4 and in anaphora line 5 and 8 but it doesn't, with the use of the imperative the speaker seems to be a hidden argreement, as an order as if he were denying that no one seems to be concerned about this death. In lines 3-4 we understand that someone important to the speaker has died. In fact, we find the vocabulary of death in the following lines with "bone" (l.2), "coffin" and "mourners" (l.4). Moreover, the "muffled drum", the only noise allowed in this stanza, is a metaphor referring to the footsteps of the mourners as they bring out the coffin. An alliteration emphasizes the speaker's grief with the /m/ sound in lines 5-6 "muffled" (l.3) and"mourners" (l.4). The speaker makes a series of surrealistic and hyperbolic requests: the speaker wants to stop the clocks, wants a public funeral, with policemen wearing black cotton gloves which is an oxymoron as the public doves wearing black bows around their necks. Dove is a powerful icon, representing purity and peace which is what Auden looking for. The speaker wants the sun, moon, and stars to all stop shining. The speaker wants the whole world to stop and grieve with him. The world does not stop after the death of this person, which isolates Auden and intensifies the isolation aspect of mourning.

Speaker isolation and grief can also be seen in the structure of this poem, we can see a form of instability with meters that change unpredictably during all the poem. In fact if we looking to the first stanza we can see that there are lines that begin with spondaic, iambic, trochaic and iambic foots. Overall, all these changes add a feeling of instability to the rhythm of the poem. Auden uses almost only finished lines, as if they were cut off from each other, without corroding words which reinforces the caesuras in lines 1 and 4. Sometimes, he uses enjambments like in line 3 and 5 which break the poem’s pattern as the alliteration of the sound /k/ which can be seen in the first stanza with "clocks" with "cut"

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