Figurative Language In Funeral Blues

W.H. Auden’s technical virtuosity has been admired by a number of poets. He was a prolific poet that reflects on politics, emotions, social issues as well as literature. Among his hundreds of poems, one of them that represents Auden’s traits is “Funeral Blues”, which mourns over the death of a significant person to narrator. By including a wide range of imagery and hyperboles and rhyming, the emotions conveyed are enhanced as Auden’s unsurpassed ability to utilize figurative language are seen, the skillful control of language can also be displayed. Auden’s use of imagery is notable that emotions in his poems are often conveyed by imageries. In the first verse, the narrator says that he wants the clocks stopped, the telephone cut, the dog’s

These sounds are all so familiar, and the auditory imagery makes the readers understand that reaching such a silent environment is nearly impossible. However, the following line, “Bring out the coffin, let the mourners come”, lets the readers understand that the only sound that he can stand is the mourner’s sounds. The grandiose commands to halt the time and sound create a static, silent and isolated space for the funeral, as if insulation from the progression of the everyday world was necessary for this ritual to occur(Mills 35). In the following verse, Auden appeals to visual imagery—“Let aeroplanes circle moaning overhead/Scribbling on the sky the message 'He is Dead’/Put crepe bows round the white necks of the public doves/Let the traffic policemen wear black cotton gloves”. This imagery has a further spatial expansion that the narrator hopes all the people in the city to mourn with him. The narrator asks the doves to wear crepe bows and the policemen to wear black gloves, which symbolizes the funeral. However, asking the plane to leave message in the sky as well as making the policemen or