Summary of Funeral Blues by Auden
“Funeral Blues” by Auden is an elegy, a poem of lament for a recently deceased companion. Its title is ambiguous. It may relate to the music performed at New Orleans funerals, it reflects the speaker’s own “blues” over this unexpected and devastating loss, and it alludes to the poetry itself, the expression of melancholy through words, metre, and rhyme. The poem as a whole pays respect to an individual who was the object of the speaker’s devotion and depicts the emotional devastation that comes with loss and the disillusionment with life that frequently follows.
The poem opens with a sequence of imperatives in which the speaker requests that all everyday sounds be muted, including ticking clocks, ringing telephones, and barking dogs. The addition of a spondee (/ /) intensifies the first demand, expressing the speaker’s intention that this normally routine day be unusually serious. Even the funeral music, which includes “pianos” and a “muffled drum” (line 3), is purposefully muted. This is not the time for celebratory or frivolous sounds. The speaker instructs “aeroplanes” hovering overhead in the second stanza to “[Scribble] on the sky the message He is Dead” (line 6). Here, the sky becomes a big billboard or writing pad on which the speaker makes the sombre announcement of his friend’s death, the message’s upper-case type emphasising the friend’s deity-like position in the speaker’s eyes. In an almost pitiful illusion, the planes are heard “moaning” (line 5), keening in response to the bad news. The speaker continues with the imperatives, insinuating that “crepe bows” be tied on the “white necks of public doves” (line 7) and that traffic police officers “wear black cotton gloves” (line 8). Thus, white, the symbolic colour of innocence, is diminished or replaced by black, the traditional colour of mourning and one that represents a public acknowledgement of death (much like the black band worn by athletes on their uniforms on similarly mournful occasions).
Stanza three ushers the poem into a more personal, first-person perspective, with the speaker conceding in lines 9-12 that the deceased was
….my North, my South, my East, my 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 stanza is dense with metaphor, with the speaker equating his beloved buddy to a compass, a calendar week, times of day, discussion, and song, demonstrating his friend’s all-encompassing affection and engagement. The stanza’s final two declarative phrases convey a romantic belief before ruthlessly and bluntly dispelling it with a harsh reality. Individuals perish. Love perishes. That is the nature of existence.
Auden’s poem’s last line contains the most intriguing wording. The speaker’s despair is so total that no celestial body, not stars, not moon, not sun can provide any ray of hope. Rather than that, the speaker dismisses the stars, declaring them “unwanted now” (line 13), and then, returning to the imperative, commands God or the cosmos to “put out every one” (line 13), like so many celestial candles. The vocabulary that follows is disjointed since it connects enormous natural bodies such as the sun, moon, ocean, and forest to minute everyday tasks such as packing a box, disassembling something, pouring something out, or sweeping something up. The verbs here, which are all imperatives, imply dismissing as if nothing in nature can ever bring him happiness again.
Auden’s poem succinctly and effectively expresses the universal anguish of loss, as well as the disconsolation and disillusionment that such loss can bring. It is a fantastic illustration of how a gifted poet can do complex things within a simple poetic form, as it is written in predominantly masculine rhyme with lines ranging from tetrameter to hexameter.
Analysis of Funeral Blues
Lines 1-2
Stop all the clocks, cut off the telephone,
Prevent the dog from barking with a juicy bone,
The poem begins with a series of harsh commands: stop the clocks! Cut off the telephones! The speaker sounds forceful, even angry.
Whoever the speaker is, he sounds angry and issues harsh commands. In the first line, he wants to stop the clocks and the telephone. These seem like physical representations of time and communication to us. He wants everything to just stop.
In the next line, he asks for silence. He wants dogs to stop barking, too.
Lines 3-4
Silence the pianos and with muffled drum
Bring out the coffin, let the mourners come.
This is not a time for pianos. It’s a time for muffled drums. Now that he’s asked the dog and the phone to hush, he has no problem extending that request to musical instruments.
Except he’s not opposed to the drum. That element fits the title. If this is a funeral we’re dealing with, drums are much more solemn and fitting for the occasion.
In the next line, he wants the coffin to be brought out for mourners to come to see it. Maybe the “muffled drum,” then, is the sound of mourners walking, or of pallbearers carrying a coffin. Or maybe it is slow and stately drumming that the speaker wants the kind of drumming that happens at military funerals.
The interesting thing about these two lines and the first two as well is that they are all commands, also known as imperatives. The speaker is making a big pronouncement to the world: someone has died, and we must acknowledge it in dramatic ways.
These lines might even seem a little exaggerated. Should we really stop the clocks just because someone has died? Probably not. But the speaker’s use of hyperbole or exaggeration conveys just how important all this mourning business is.
Line 3 has eleven syllables, and line 4 has ten. It is safe to call this one iambic pentameter.
And by the end of stanza 1, we’ve also got a clear rhyme scheme at work. “Telephone” rhymes with “bone,” and “drum” rhymes with “come.”
Whenever you see a four-line stanza or quatrain that has an aabb rhyme scheme in a poem about a funeral, you’re reading an elegiac stanza.
Lines 5-6
Let aeroplanes circle moaning overhead
Scribbling on the sky the message He is Dead,
As if stopping the clocks weren’t enough, the speaker would like an aeroplane to write “He is Dead” in skywriting to commemorate his grief. If a funeral is a public acknowledgement of death, then this is a super public acknowledgement of death.
While earlier he asked for quiet, and for people to cut off their telephones (which are private communication devices), he wants the whole world to know that “He Is Dead.”
Interestingly, the speaker doesn’t provide a name. He could have written, for example, “John Is Dead.” Or “Tommy Is Dead.” But he leaves 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 acknowledgements of death.
Lines 7-8
