Funeral Blues Analysis

Wystan Hugh Auden (1907-1973) is an english-american poet considered as one of the most influent and important of the 20th century. This poem was first written in 1936 as a satiric poem for the play The Ascent of F6 that he wrote with Christopher Isherwood. This poem has been reworked by Auden in 1938 with the help of Benjamin Britten to turn it into a song for a famous singer of the time, Hedli Anderson. W.H. Auden published the final version of the poem Funeral Blues in 1940 in his book Another Time as one of the “Four Cabaret songs for Miss Hedli Anderson”. The poem became more famous again when a character of the film “Four weddings and a funeral” recites the poem during his lover funerals. This is an elegiac poem which means it is a funeral

Funeral Blues is made of 4 stanzas. The first stanza is a quatrain made of masculine lines. Lines 2 and 4 are end-stopped lines. The rhyme scheme follows the couplet logic (aabb) with masculine rimes, which are end rhymes and true rhymes. Lines one and 4 are iambic pentameter, line 2 is iambic hexameter and line 3 is an trochaic, anapestic, iambic pentameter, the trochee is used to stress the word silence. From line 1 to 2 the poem starts with orders such as “stop all the clocks, cut off the telephone, prevent the dog from barking with a juicy bone”. The speaker seems angry or upset, he asks for silence and we don 't know why for now. In line 3 and 4 he is still asking for silence, but only pianos because he has no problems with drums that he encourages to accompany the arrival of the coffin and the mourners. From this moment we finally know the reason of all these demands. In this first stanza we can notice that they are all imperatives, because someone is dead things have to happen in a certain way, following the orders of the speaker. With all these extreme requests the speaker uses hyperbole to show how important the death of someone is, or how important the death of this

The third stanza is the same as the others concerning the number of lines and the rhyme scheme, except there are no end-stopped lines. Line 9 is a traditional ambic pentameter, whereas line 10 and 11 are iambic anapestic pentameter, and line 12 is an iambic hexameter. From line 9 to 11, we understand now that the speaker didn 't make all these demands because it was a very famous person or something like this, but because he loved the dead man so much. He uses metaphors to show his love to the man who used to mean everything to him. He was his “North, [his] South, [his] East and West” (line 9) can mean this man was a compass to him, he guided him and always showed him the right direction and the right things to do. The man was also his “working week and [his] sunday rest, [his] noon, [his] midnight, [his] talk, [his] song” (line 10-11), he had a really important place in the speaker 's daily life, it is like the spent every weeks, every days, every hours together. We understand now the pain of the speaker who must feels empty since his death. The last line of this stanza goes in this direction, and is really heartbreaking and unexpected. The speaker ends-up with the metaphors and say the things like they are : he “thought that love would last forever” (line 12) and this death made him understand he was wrong. What he thought was an absolute truth is now