This document is a summary of 'Funeral Blues' by W.H. Auden. The document includes analyses regarding each line, tone and mood, structure, themes, diction, imagery etc. Furthermore, a collection of contextual questions from past papers is included in the summary.
Funeral Blues
“Stop all the clocks, cut off the “Silence the pianos and with muffled
telephone, drum
Prevent the dog from barking with a Bring out the coffin, let the mourners
juicy bone” come”
The poem begins with a series of harsh This is not a time for pianos. It's a time
commands: stop the clocks! Cut off the for muffled drums. Now that he has
telephones! This is the exaggeration of asked the dog and the phone to be
the speaker’s grief so much so that he silent, he has no problem extending
wants the world to come to a standstill. that request to musical instruments.
The speaker sounds forceful, even In the next line, he wants the coffin to
angry. be brought out and for mourners to
come see it.
Whoever the speaker is, he sounds
angry, and issues harsh commands. In The ‘muffled drum’, maybe, is the
the first line, he wants to stop the clocks sound of mourners walking, or of
and the telephone. These seem like pallbearers carrying a coffin or maybe it
physical representations of time and is a slow and stately drumming that the
communication to us. speaker wants, the kind of drumming
that happens at military funerals.
He wants everything to just stop.
The speaker is making a big
In the next line, he asks for silence. He
pronouncement to the world: someone
wants dogs to stop barking, too.
has died, and we must acknowledge it
in dramatic ways.
The speaker uses a hyperbole or
exaggeration to convey just how
important all this mourning business is.
“Let aeroplanes circle moaning “Put crépe bows round the white necks
overhead of the public doves,
Scribbling on the sky the message He is Let the traffic policemen wear black
Dead” cotton gloves”
As if stopping the clocks weren't More public demands, as the speaker
enough, the speaker would like an wants even the ‘public doves’ — we
airplane to write ‘He is Dead’ in have a strong feeling that these are
skywriting to commemorate his grief. pigeons —to honour the dead man. He
wants the traffic police to acknowledge
While earlier he asked for quiet, and for
him, too.
people to cut off their telephones (which
are private communication devices), he This is an exaggerated expectation of
wants the whole world to know that ‘He the public to share in his grief and
Is Dead’. mourning.
It's interesting that the speaker doesn't
provide a name. He could have written,
for example, ‘John Is Dead’. He leaves
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, the dead man's name anonymous.
Maybe he wants more privacy after all
or maybe he assumes that everyone
already knows ‘his name’.
Either way, there's an interesting
mixture between private and public
acknowledgments of death
“He was my North, my South, my East “My noon, my midnight, my talk, my
and West, song;
My working week and my Sunday rest, I thought that love would last forever: I
” was wrong”
This speaker is so broken up (and wants These lines seem to imply that the dead
everyone else to be broken up too) man filled every hour of the speaker's
because he really loved the dead man. day. He brought conversation and joy
It doesn't seem like the dead man was into the speaker's life.
important world-wide. While the previous lines were lovely
The dead man is someone the speaker and metaphorical, this one is harsh.
knew and loved in daily life. Your loved ones will die. No love lasts
forever.
These lines are incredibly personal,
especially when compared to the earlier This represents the speakers deep and
lines that are mostly about public utter devastation by his loss of his
mourning. The dead man meant loved one.
everything to the speaker, so it's no
wonder he'd like the world around him
to reflect the fact that the man is dead.
(Metaphor) This is indicative of how the
deceased had given the speaker
direction and purpose in life.
“The stars are not wanted now: put out “Pour away the ocean and sweep up
every one, the wood:
Pack up the moon and dismantle the For nothing now can ever come to any
sun,” good”
The speaker grows even more This highlights the speakers utter grief,
depressed in these lines. He demands devastation and depression which runs
that someone, whomever he's talking so deep that he cannot see his life to
to, put out the stars, pack up the moon, continue as normal given his pain and
and take apart the sun. Now his grief is grief.
so extreme, it's affecting the way he In these final lines, the speaker
sees the cosmos. continues his hyperbolic thinking and
His extreme, hyperbolic commands are asks us to get rid of the ocean and the
his expressions of his extreme grief. wood (wood = forests). He doesn't want
to see any sign of the wonders of
Even though no one could ever
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