Summary Essay guide to writing a level nine essay on the poem "Funeral Blues"
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Course
English
Institution
Fourth Year / 10th Grade
Sample essay for Funeral Blues by WH Auden including structure, imagery and poetic devices. Incorporates information from different sources as well as my input.
"Funeral Blues", or "Stop all the clocks", is a poem by W. H. Auden that first appeared in the
1936 play The Ascent of F6. The poem is an elegy as the speaker laments about the death of
their lover who meant the entire world to them. The title of the poem “Funeral Blues” is
important as The 'blues' is a genre of music originating in the USA among the African-
American community, arising from the songs sung by slaves from West Africa. It features
slow, reflective melodies and lyrics and often uses the sorrows of life as a subject,
which fits the sorrowful nature of this poem perfectly. The structure of the poem is
simple as it is written in quatrains and has four stanzas, each with four lines. Through the
effective use of Poetic Devices, Structure and Diction, the poet ________________.
Thesis point 1 – Poetic Devices
1) Parataxis and Asyndeton
- He was my north, my south, my east, my west
- lost all directions of life, now alone and disoriented, does not know how to live
life without his lover by his side.
- The speaker's lover was like their compass, surrounding the speaker in all
directions and the loss of their lover made the speaker feel utterly and
completely lost, almost as if their life held no sense of direction anymore and the
speaker was left disoriented and alone.
2) Symbolism – stop the clocks, turn off the telephone, pianos
- Evidence of life going on to be suspended
- Stop all the clocks is symbolic of the speaker wanting to stop time itself, and
turning off the telephones means wanting to isolate themselves from the rest of
the world, and wanting to silence the pianos signifies the speaker calling for all
celebrations to stop and they see no point in enjoying their life is their significant
other is not present as well.
3) “Funeral Blues” uses a lot of consonances, often of hard or plosive sounds like /k/,
/p/, and /b/ in the first two stanzas which shows that the speaker of “Funeral Blues”
is in no mood for the soft and soothing. Instead, the speaker wants to cry out in grief
and heartbreak; the speaker wants to rage against the world that took away the
speaker's love. Consonance helps express this underlying sense of frustration.
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