Funeral Blues Essay, Research Paper
W.H. Auden wrote Funeral Blues the poem. Wystan Hugh Auden (1907-1973) was born in York, England, and later became and American citizen. Auden was the founder for a generation of English poets, such as C. Day Lewis, and Stephen Spender. Auden s earlier works were composed of a Marxist outlook with a knowledge of Freudian Psychology. Later works consisted of professing Christianity, and what he considered increasing conservatism . In 1946 Auden emigrated and became an American citizen. While in America he composed many verse plays, travel memoirs, and Opera lyrics. His last years of life were spent traveling and collaborating works of influential criticism.
Funeral Blues
Stop all the clocks, cut off the telephone,
Prevent the dog from barking with a juicy bone,
Silence the pianos and muffled drum
Bring out the coffin, let the mourners come.
Let aeroplanes circle moaning overhead
Scribbling on the sky the message He Is Dead,
Tie crepe bows round the white necks of the public doves,
Let the traffic policemen wear black cotton gloves.
He was my North, my South, my East and West,
My working week and my Sunday rest,
My noon, my midnight, my talk, my song;
I thought that love would last forever: I was wrong.
The stars are not wanted now: put out every one,
Pack up the moon and dismantle the sun,
Pour away the ocean and sweep up the woods;
For nothing now can ever good.
Funeral Blues is a Song poem, in which it has a certain rhythm, or beat, which can be sung to. This poem is called a blues song. The blues were originally music developed by the slaves in the south that spoke of sadness, pain, or a time of loss. Blues songs were traditionally composed of three-line stanzas where the first two lines are identical and followed by a concluding riming third line. However, Auden does not include the three-line stanzas in his poem, and it is written in a freestyle form with the rhyming pattern: AA, BB, CC, DD, EE, FF, GG, HH.
Death is the subject of this poem, and becomes cl
Rime and Rhythm
I thought that love would last forever, I was wrong:
I thought that this poem was very well written. Auden does an excellent job of using both old qualities of blues, and adding in his own ideas. Using a great deal of allusions, imagery, and personification made it easier to understand what he is feeling. Most of the poem was clear except the sex of the narrator, I believe the narrator to be a male, which would make him gay. The reason I believe this is because the poem seems to be written in a more masculine way than feminine. There is no evidence of this, but I feel as though it was a male narrator. The sex of the narrator is not a major concern in this poem, but it an interesting point, especially for the time era it was written in, when homosexuals were considered dirty . Funeral Blues was a great poem with a lot of imagery, which made it easier for you to understand how the narrator was feeling the whole time, and how he thought that without his lover, the world meant nothing.