Funeral Blues by W. H. Auden

Funeral Blues by W.H.
Auden
Stop all the clocks, cut off the telephone,

Prevent the dog from barking with a juicy bone,
Silence the pianos and with muffled drum
Bring out the coffin, let the mourners come.
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.
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 wood;
For nothing now can ever come to any good.
***
Funeral Blues by W. H. Auden 1|Page
‘Funeral Blues,’ also known as ‘Stop all the Clocks,’ is arguably Auden’s most famous poem.
It was first published in ‘The Year’s Poetry’ in 1938.
The poem is a morose, sad elegy that wonderfully describes the feelings associated with
grieving. It’s filled with clever twists and heart-wrenching statements that give it a real
poignancy, features that may explain the poem’s enduring popularity. It showcases Auden’s
poetic ability to relate to human emotions.
Summary
‘Funeral Blues’ by W.H. Auden is about the power of grief and the way that it influences
people differently.
For someone like the speaker who has suffered a loss, the world is transformed. But to
everyone else, nothing changes. Time doesn’t slow down and no one cares what’s
happening. The indifference of the world plagues the speaker in this poem. They plead with
the world to feel as they do, understand his grief, and even participate in it.
***
Themes
There are several important themes in W.H. Auden’s‘Funeral Blues’. These include
grief/silence, isolation, and death. All three of these themes are tied together within the text
as the speaker discusses what grief over the death of a loved one is like and how it separates
one from the rest of the world. In the first lines, the speaker demands that everything quiet
down and that all the “mourners come” to mourn. The speaker seeks out transformation in
the world but is unable to find it. They are isolated in their loss and no one adequately
respects that fact.
***
Form and Tone
‘Funeral Blues,’ is a classic elegy. While the narrator does not go into specific detail about the
loss suffered, the feelings of loss are very present. The text is referenced often in film and TV
(such as in Four Weddings and a Funeral and Gavin and Stacey). Auden structured the poem in

four, four-line stanzas known as quatrains. These quatrains follow an AABB rhyming pattern,
changing end sounds as the poet saw fit. It is an atypically somber poem and is, therefore, a
popular reading at funerals. Most of the poem is delivered through an omniscient,
anonymous narrator. But as the lines go on, the amorphous loss becomes more personal the
speaker makes use of first-person pronouns.
***
Poetic Techniques
Within ‘Funeral Blues’ Auden makes use of several poetic techniques. These
include caesura, anaphora, alliteration, enjambment and hyperbole. The first,
caesura, occurs when a line is split in half, sometimes with punctuation, sometimes not. For
example, the fourth line of the first stanza, as well as the fourth line of the third stanza.
Alliteration, another important and common technique within Auden’s works, occurs when
words are used in succession, or at least appear close together, and begin with the same
letter. For instance, in the first line of the first stanza: “the clocks, cut off” or “working
week” in the second line of the third stanza.
Auden also makes use of anaphora, or the repetition of a word or phrase at the beginning of
multiple lines, usually in succession. This appears sporadically throughout the text, for
example, “Let” at the beginning of lines one and four of the second stanza and “My” at the
start of lines two and three of the third.
Towards the end of the poem, hyperbole becomes quite important. It is an

intentionally exaggerated description, comparison or exclamation meant to further the
writer’s important themes, or make a specific impact on a reader. the last lines ask the
impossible, that one should “Pack up the moon and dismantle the sun” and put out the
stars.
Another important technique commonly used in poetry is enjambment. It occurs when a line
is cut off before its natural stopping point. Enjambment forces a reader down to the next
line, and the next, quickly. One has to move forward in order to comfortably resolve a
phrase or sentence. It can be seen throughout the poem, but a few examples include
the transition between lines three and four of the first stanza and line one and two of the
second stanza.

Analysis of Funeral Blues
Stanza One

What a powerful way to start a poem. The idea of stopping the clocks serves two purposes
here. First, it stops the noise that they potentially make, the annoying ticking sound, but also
it signifies the stopping of time. When somebody dies their time is said to be up and this
represents that. That is followed up with “cut off” the telephone, the poet could have used
the word disconnect, but the idea of being “cut off” acts as a subtle double entendre.
There is an ever-present theme of stopping sounds and promoting silence, hence preventing
the dog from barking. In fact, that seems to be the overarching theme of this first stanza.
Silence is the order of the day. What is interesting is the idea of silencing the piano with a
muffled drum. I think the drum referenced here isn’t an actual drum. Rather, it is a
representation of the footsteps of pole bearers as the next line in the stanza references the
arrival of the coffin. It is feasible the marching action performed by these men could elicit
the experience of a drum beat. Interestingly, the stanza ends with the phrase “let the
mourners come,” an invitation of sorts.
Stanza Two
Lines 1-2
Let airplanes circle moaning overhead

Scribbling on the sky the message “He is Dead”.
Auden is meticulously clever in the language that he uses. Once again in this stanza, he
makes reference to noises. This time though he describes the airplanes as “moaning”. The
first thing of importance to note is that the sound of the word “moaning” sounds a lot like
the word mourning. But, it is also a noise associated with death or dying. This clever word
choice is a feature of Auden’s poetry and can be seen throughout ‘Funeral Blues’.
The next line has an element of the surreal about it. Suggesting that a plane could use its
chemical trails to write anything as complex as that is pretty unrealistic. I think this line is

more about displaying the narrator’s feelings though. There is an element of “for all I care”
about this line as if the narrator doesn’t want to deal with anything and just everything to go
away as quickly as possible.
Lines 3-4
In the next line of ‘Funeral Blues,’ the narrator evokes the image of the “dove”. The dove is a
powerful icon, especially from a religious standpoint. It represents purity and peace,
drawing us back to the narrator’s desire for quiet. What is notable though is this is slightly
subverted. Auden uses “public doves.” Could he be referencing the common pigeon
through this phrase? Is the suggestion here that he wants a commonplace animal to dress
formally and pay its respects, to signify that the loss of this person is a loss to everybody.
The next line suggests so as it recommends that even the traffic police should be in
mourning. Wearing black gloves would be a sign of respect to the departed.
***
Stanza Three

This stanza of ‘Funeral Blues’ talks explicitly about what the person they are mourning
meant to them. The opening line references the points of a compass and carries the
suggestion of a loss of direction. The speaker is lost, physically and emotionally, without
their partner.
The next line furthers the importance of the deceased. It is the narrator’s way of saying that
this person meant everything to them. The third line emphasizes this. By stating they have
lost their “talk” and their “song,” they are once again bringing the poem back to the theme
of silence that has reoccurred throughout the poem. It is clear from the last line of the
stanza that the narrator loved the person they are referencing dearly and that they thought
that emotion would last forever. It has clearly been replaced by grieving.

Stanza Four
The opening line to the final stanza of ‘Funeral Blues’ is among the more striking in the entire
poem. It describes the listless feeling one experiences when everything seems pointless and
irritating. The stars represent hope and love and the narrator has no interest in these things
at this point. Their grieving has put them in a, figuratively, very dark place. The theme of
darkness continues as they then talk about dismantling the heavens. They truly feel that
they cannot continue now they have lost their loved one.
The melodrama of the narrator’s emotions in ‘Funeral Blues’ peaks with the penultimate line
as they suggest doing away with the oceans. It is clear that they feel that now the person
that they are mourning has been removed from their lives that they will never enjoy
happiness again. This is extremely powerful and emotional material and anyone who has
suffered a tragic loss will no doubt be able to relate to the content of this poem.
About W.H. Auden
Wystan Hugh Auden was born in England but later became a citizen of the United States. He
is a divisive figure although most scholars recognize his importance as one of the
most renowned poets of the twentieth century they are often critical of his style and of his
importance. Auden’s poems cover a wide range of topics from politics, religion, love, and
social issues. He has a large back catalog of work and also wrote plays/films as well as
poems. He was also a prolific essayist.
Structure
Even from the title, one can deduce the poem is an elegy. The content of the lines
throughout the poem affirm it is, indeed, an elegy. There are four stanzas, each consisting of
four lines; these are named quatrains. Many lines are written in iambic pentameter, a
standard of elegies. Every stanza follows an AABB rhyme scheme. It is not altogether
surprising to read such a poem from Auden, given it is not the only one he wrote of the
variety.

Analysis
The tone of the poem is immediately set as the speaker demonstrates mourning over the
loss of a loved one from the first line. Just as time has stopped for the deceased, time has
slowed to a stop for the speaker, unable to come to terms with the loss. The speaker
(henceforth referred to as "he") shows signs of retreating within himself and cutting off
communication. The silence experienced by the reader parallels the same silence sought out
or felt by the speaker.

This line brings more silence. The silence is accompanied by cutting out the joys in life. It is
indeed a time of loss and sorrow.

It is clear the speaker wants focus on the deceased for proper mourning. The silence
continues to grow with each line. Even the sound of music for the deceased is described as
"muffled." This can be meant in a literal and figurative sense. Literally, the sound emitted
from the drum may not be loud and clear. Figuratively, it is an echo of how the speaker feels
and perceives the world around him at this moment in time.

Scribbling on the sky the message ‘He is Dead’.
Here, the speaker goes more into figurative language. The airplanes are "moaning," as if
expressing their own sadness over the person being grieved for. Everything surrounding him
expresses the deep sorrow he feels. And anything that is not in keeping with his mourning is
something he wishes to shut off. The line "Scribbling on the sky the message ‘He is Dead’" is,
most likely, figurative. It is an announcement to the world of the passing of the person. It is
the news and reality of the person’s passing covering the sky and, as result, covering
everything below it like a blanket. This loss and pain cannot be quieted, unlike the other
mundane things the speaker his silenced through the course of the poem.
It may not be entirely clear what or who the "public doves" are. However, what is certain is
that the speaker feels everything and everyone is (or should be) shrouded in sadness. It is
not uncommon for perspective to shift after such a terrible loss that affects one’s life. He
believes the deceased deserves the utmost respect and appropriate form of mourning. The
grief is as inescapable as it is unable to be quieted.

If the strong love the speaker felt toward the deceased was not clear until now, the reader
simply cannot miss it at this point. The speaker is unquestionably and directly telling the
reader the deceased person was everything to him. This is a loss of someone that affected
every moment and aspect of the speaker’s life. It is completely understandable how this loss
may feel insurmountable.

There is a timeless notion that love conquers all and lasts for eternity. The message the
speaker is delivering based off his emotions is extremely pained. It is based on a reality that
pains us all. Unfortunately, death cannot be escaped. And those who remain are left with
the emptiness of the loss. We will one day lose the most beloved people in our lives, just as
they will lose us.
Everything that gives light and stands for life, radiance, and beauty is everything the speaker
has shut out. All of these images are dark and full of despair, heavy with the emotions of the
speaker.

The despair flows through to the very end of the poem. The speaker does not foresee a
change, cannot even think of a foreseeable change. Just as the lamented person was
everything for him in life, he/she overtakes everything after death. It is a very strong
mourning the speaker personally experiences.
Summary
The poem tells, in great detail, about the suffering of the speaker after the loss of a loved
one. The speaker of the poem goes on to express his lament by describing what he sees,
hears (or does not hear), and what he thinks should be done to show mourning. It is a poem
filled with intense sadness. It is such that the reader cannot escape it, just as the speaker
cannot. This does an excellent job of drawing the reader in to truly experience such loss.
Theme
The obvious theme of the poem is death. Even in the last line of the third stanza, the speaker
directly makes sure the reader takes note of death’s inevitability. The poem in its entirety
forces the reader to understand the terrible pain of losing someone close and important to

one’s life. This extends into other notions of coping with loss and how relationships (and
that tie being broken) affect a person’s life. Though are other themes contained in the
poem, death is the main and overarching theme.
A Short Analysis of W. H. Auden’s ‘Stop All the Clocks’
A critical reading of Auden’s ‘Funeral Blues’ by Dr Oliver Tearle
W. H. Auden’s poem ‘Stop all the clocks’ – poem number IX in his Twelve Songs, and also
sometimes known as ‘Funeral Blues’ – is a poem so famous and universally understood that
perhaps it is unnecessary to offer much in the way of textual analysis. Yet we’re going to
offer some notes towards an analysis of ‘Funeral Blues’ in this post, because if a poem does
touch us and move us in some way – especially so many of us – it’s always worth trying to
explain why.
The poem – and the work of W. H. Auden (1907-73) more generally – was brought to a whole
new audience when it was quoted in full in the 1994 film Four Weddings and a Funeral, in
which Auden is described as a ‘splendid bugger’. You can read ‘Stop all the clocks’, which
was first published in 1936, here.
‘Funeral Blues’: summary
A brief summary of ‘Funeral Blues’ first. The poem is divided into four stanzas. The first two
stanzas see the speaker of the poem, who is mourning the loss of a close friend (or, indeed,
a lover), making a series of requests or commands.
In the first stanza, he asks that the clocks be stopped, the telephone be cut off so it cannot
ring, the dog be kept quiet with a bone to gnaw, and the music of the pianos be
discontinued. Instead, let the muffled drumbeats – historically associated with funerals –
accompany the coffin as it is brought out and the mourners at the funeral arrive.
So far, so straightforward. During a funeral and, more widely, a time of mourning, you might
not want to be disturbed by the noise of the world around you, partly because you need
time to grieve and partly because such sounds are a reminder that the world around you
carries on. The requests the speaker makes are paving the way for the funeral, after all.

In the second stanza, the speaker’s requests become different, however. He moves from a
private or close-knit ceremony of mourning – the funeral of ‘Funeral Blues’ – to wish for an
altogether more public display of grief. But this is faintly absurd.
He asks that the planes circle in the sky and, using the relatively recent phenomenon of
skywriting (first used for advertising purposes by the Daily Mail in 1922, just over a decade
before Auden wrote ‘Funeral Blues’), that the message ‘He Is Dead’ be scribbled across the
sky. This is, to say the least, unlikely to happen.
The crepe bows he wants to put round the necks of the public doves (what are ‘public
doves’, by the way – does he mean pigeons?) suggests that the speaker’s grief is
overwhelming and that he wants the whole world to mourn with him. The bows round the
necks of the doves, and the black cotton gloves – black being associated with mourning –
that he wants the traffic policemen to wear, are both excessive and unreasonable requests
to make, but this is precisely the point.
One’s personal grief dwarfs the concerns of the rest of the world, and it often becomes
inconceivable that everyone else would not share in the feeling of loss and sorrow the
individual feels.
Indeed, as the third stanza makes clear, the man who has died was everything to the
speaker: no matter where he was, or what day it was, or what time of day, the dead
man was the speaker’s life. This suggests that the speaker is talking about more than a
friend, and is lamenting the loss of a lover: Auden himself was gay, of course, and the idea
Funeral Blues by W. H. Auden 10 | P a g e

that the poem is an elegy by a male poet for a dead male lover is certainly how the poem
was interpreted in Four Weddings and a Funeral, where John Hannah’s character recites the
poem at the death of his lover, played by Simon Callow.
The speaker thought that his lover would always be around, but with three simple words,
heartbreakingly delivered at the end of the stanza, he concludes: ‘I was wrong.’
The final stanza then takes a number of romantic tropes typically associated with poetry –
the stars, the moon, the sun, the oceans – and rejects them as unhelpful. What use are such
symbols of romantic love when you have lost your one true love?
As with the previous stanza, the power of Auden’s poetry in this stanza lies in the contrast
between this catalogue of now-useless poetic tropes in the first three lines and the final line,
which is breathtakingly simple and direct.
So, mentioning these poetic tropes has a dual purpose: as well as rejecting the usefulness of
such romantic talk in the face of his grief, the speaker is also saying that the world – indeed,
the entire universe – is of no worth if it does not have his lover in it.
‘Funeral Blues’: analysis
‘Funeral Blues’ is, then, a poem full of common tropes associated with funerals and
mourning. But immediately from those opening words onwards, ‘Stop all the clocks’, there is
a suggestion that the poem is going above and beyond – or asking us to go above and
beyond – the usual conventions associated with the mourning of a lost loved one. (After all,
who stops all the clocks when someone suffers a personal tragedy, apart from Miss
Havisham?)
And when we examine the tropes and images of Auden’s poem more closely, it becomes
more interesting. Is this poem, after all, a sincere expression of personal grief? There is a
sense of the melodramatic in many of the (impossible or unreasonable) requests the
speaker demands: putting out all of the stars, for instance, or pouring away all the oceans.
Even asking the traffic policemen to don black gloves in recognition of the passing of the
dead person seems excessive.
Perhaps, then, this is not merely an expression of personal grief, but a poem of mourning for
a more public figure? After all, we are used to more rhetoric, and to wholesale public
displays of mourning, when a high-profile public figure dies. That said, sky-writing the news

of the person’s death – when sky-writing using aeroplanes was more common for
celebrations or for advertising – seems to strike an odd note. What is Auden saying, then?
In that final stanza, too, the word ‘dismantle’ verges on being flippant in the second line, as
if the sun is a mechanical device that one can simply take apart, like a watch. It suggests that
even the natural world seems fake and unreal now that the joys of the world have been
taken from him. But it is also overblown. Should we, then, respond to these lines as a
symptom of the speaker’s hyper-emotional grief for the death of someone who was, as he
himself acknowledges, his everything, his north, south, east, and west? Maybe. But then,
maybe not.
Looking into the origins of ‘Stop All the Clocks’ and placing the poem within this original
literary context helps to make sense of these aspects. Although it is often read and even
analysed as a sincere and personal expression of grief, spoken and written by one man
about the death of another man – and Auden himself is one of the best-known gay poets of
the twentieth century – this was not how the poem was originally conceived. It was not
personal, but public; and not sincere, but, in actual fact, a parody.
Curiously, ‘Stop All the Clocks’ began life as a piece of burlesque sending up blues lyrics of
the 1930s: Auden originally wrote it for a play he was collaborating on with Christopher
Isherwood, The Ascent of F6 (1936), which wasn’t entirely serious (although it was billed as a
tragedy). The play is about a climber named Michael Ransom who undertakes a sponsored
expedition to the peak of a fictional mountain named F6. Ransom (spoiler alert) is desperate
to beat a rival nation to the peak and dies in his hasty attempt to be the first to scale the
mountain.
As Rick Rylance has recently noted in his stimulating and informative book Literature and the
Public Good (The Literary Agenda), ‘the poem taken so sincerely to the hearts of many
people was, in origin, a p*ss-take.’ But it has nevertheless become a genuine and heartfelt
expression of grief to thousands of readers, and a favourite reading at funerals.
And it might be more accurate to say that half of the poem began as a parody: the first two
stanzas of ‘Funeral Blues’ (or ‘Stop All the Clocks’) appear in The Ascent of F6, but the second
half of the poem as we know it was added later. (Instead of ‘He was my North, my South’
etc. we get, in The Ascent of F6, the rather more tongue-in-cheek couplet, ‘Hold up your
umbrellas to keep off the rain / From Doctor Williams while he opens a vein’.)
It appears that Auden salvaged those two stanzas from the otherwise forgotten play he
wrote with Isherwood, and added two new stanzas to them, turning the poem into a more

serious expression of grief and lost love. And yet traces of the poem’s original satirical mode
remain, such as in that uneasy opening couplet of ‘telephone’ and ‘juicy bone’, and the
excessive language used throughout, noted above.
‘Funeral Blues’ is written in quatrains rhymed aabb: although it is arranged into quatrains or
four-line stanzas, its rhyme scheme is rhyming couplets. The metre of the poem is
(loosely) iambic pentameter, although there are many variations, with the second line
having twelve syllables, for instance. This gives the poem a more conversational and
unpredictable feel which is perhaps fitting for a poem about the vagaries of personal grief,
and the poem’s origins as a satire on public outpourings of loss and mourning only serve to
reinforce such an interpretation.
As we said at the start of this close reading, many readers may feel that no additional
analysis of W. H. Auden’s poem is required. ‘Funeral Blues’ is not a difficult or elusive (or
allusive) poem. But some its images are worth commenting on, as well as the way it achieves
its emotional effects, the way it carries such a punch.
About W. H. Auden
Wystan Hugh Auden (1907-73) was born in York, England, and was educated at the
University of Oxford. He described how the poetic outlook when he was born was
‘Tennysonian’ but by the time he went to Oxford as a student in 1925, T. S. Eliot’s The Waste
Land had altered the English poetic landscape away from Tennyson and towards what we
now call ‘modernism’.
Surprisingly given his later, better-known work, Auden’s early poetry flirted with the
obscurity of modernism: in 1932 his long work The Orators (a mixture of verse and prose
poetry with an incomprehensible plot) was published by Faber and Faber, then under the
watchful eye of none other than T. S. Eliot. Auden later distanced himself from this
experimental false start, describing The Orators as the kind of work produced by someone
who would later either become a fascist or go mad.
Auden thankfully did neither, embracing instead a more traditional set of poetic forms (he
wrote a whole sequence of sonnets about the Sino-Japanese War of the late 1930s) and a
more direct way of writing that rejected modernism’s love of obscure allusion. This does not
mean that Auden’s work is always straightforward in its meaning, and arguably his most
famous poem, ‘Funeral Blues’, is often ‘misread’ as sincere elegy when it was intended to be
a send-up or parody of public obituaries.

In early 1939, not long before the outbreak of the Second World War, Auden left Britain for
the United States, much to the annoyance of his fellow left-wing writers who saw such a
move as a desertion of Auden’s political duty as the most prominent English poet of the
decade. In America, where he lived for much of the rest of his life with his long-time partner
Chester Kallman, Auden collaborated with composers on a range of musicals and continued
to write poetry, but 90% of his best work belongs to the 1930s, the decade with which is
most associated. He died in 1973 in Austria, where he had a holiday home.
Discover more of Auden’s work with our discussion of his classic poem about suffering and
the fall of Icarus, his poem about New York refugees, and his short poem about
tyrants. Continue to explore Auden’s work with the wonderful Collected Auden.
You can watch John Hannah reciting ‘Funeral Blues’ in Four Weddings and a Funeral here.
The author of this article, Dr Oliver Tearle, is a literary critic and lecturer in English at
Loughborough University. He is the author of, among others, The Secret Library: A Book-
Lovers’ Journey Through Curiosities of History and The Great War, The Waste Land and the
Modernist Long Poem.
Funeral Blues by W. H. Auden
W.H Auden’s “Funeral Blues,” written in 1936, illustrates a funeral scenario where the
speaker expresses his sadness over the loss of a loved one, and the respect and silence that
was present, followed by past memories. The speaker ends the poem with how nothing
matters to him anymore, as nothing can take him back to the past.
***

Funeral Blues
BY W. H. AUDEN


Scribbling on the sky the message He is Dead.

Pour away the ocean and sweep up the woods;
Analysis of Auden’s “Funeral Blues”
20th century poet W.H Auden’s 1936 poem, “Funeral Blues” focuses on themes of
dependence, death, and grief. The issue that the poem deals with is that of somebody losing
a loved one, and therefore, the aforementioned person feeling as though their world has
been destroyed. The idea of total loss is shown, and the poem evokes many emotions in the
readers, including pain, despair, and sadness.
The poem is of the narrative type, as it tells the story of the death of somebody and how
that has affected the speaker. The narrator talks about how he feels after somebody
important has passed. Auden uses first person to build a direct connection between the
readers and the poem, and this also makes the poem a strong and emotional one.

Poetic techniques like symbolism are widely used in this poem to assist in the portrayal of
the key themes of death, grief, and dependence. For instance, in the first stanza, sayings
like, “Stop all the clocks” and “silence the pianos” symbolize how the speaker is affected by
the death of somebody; they show feelings of grief and denial.
Throughout the poem, there are words that represent a sad and unpleasant connotation.
Words such as “cut off,” “stop,” and “silence” have a sudden and negative connotation.
Furthermore, the colors in the poem like “Blue” and “Black” represent a very depressing
and cold emotion. In the last stanza, words such as “pack up,” “pour away” and “dismantle”
represent a separation and isolation of the world that the speaker chooses to be in as he is
very upset.
The poem can easily resonate with a lot of readers’ values and beliefs. It can resonate with
anyone who values the people around them and heavily depends on loved ones in times of
need.
W. H. Auden: Poems Summary and Analysis of "Funeral Blues (Stop All the Clocks)"
Gradesaver.com
The poet calls for the clocks to be stopped, the telephone to be cut off, and the dog and
pianos silenced. The coffin will be brought out to the mourners with a muffled drum and
under the moan of airplanes that spell out the message, “He Is Dead.” Doves are to be
decked with bows around their necks, and the traffic policemen are to wear black cotton
gloves.
The poet thinks of the deceased as “my North, my South, my East and West,” his work and
his rest, his noon and his midnight, his talk and his song. He incorrectly thought their love
would last forever.
The stars, moon, sun, ocean, and forests, the poet writes, should be sent away; they are no
longer needed, and “nothing now can ever come to any good.”
Analysis
“Funeral Blues” has an interesting composition history. It originally appeared as a song in a
play Auden co-wrote with Christopher Isherwood called The Ascent of F6. In this form the
last two stanzas were not included, and three others followed instead. The characters in the
play were specifically invoked, and the play was an ironic statement on how “great men” are
lionized after their deaths. The poem was then included in Auden’s poetry collection of 1936

(sometimes under the book title Look, Stranger!, which Auden hated). The poem was titled
“Funeral Blues” by 1937, when it was published in Collected Poems. Here it had been
rewritten as a cabaret song to fit with the kind of burlesque reviews popular in Berlin, and it
was intended for Hedli Anderson in a piece by Benjamin Britten. It is also sometimes referred
to as “Funeral Blues (Stop All the Clocks)” due to its famous first line. It is perhaps most
famous for its delivery by a character in the English comedy/drama Four Weddings and a
Funeral, in which a character mourns his dead lover.
The poem in the format readers usually see it today is a dirge, or a lament for the dead. Its
tone is much more somber than early iterations, and the themes more universal, although it
speaks of an individual. It has four stanzas of four lines each with lines in varying numbers of
syllables but containing about four beats each. Auden plays with the form a bit in the poem,
and critics debate whether or not this was a manifestation of his tendency to do just that—
whether he was simply playing around or intended a larger point.
As with many of his poems, there is a mingling of the high and the low. This is in the style of
a classical elegy, though it features informal language and objects of everyday life such as a
telephone. This mingling, writes one scholar, “is a powerful modernist move, one which
suggests that only by embracing the modern world can art come to terms with the
complexities of human experience.”
The poem appears from the perspective of a man (seemingly the poet himself) deeply
mourning the loss of a lover who has died. He begins by calling for silence from the everyday
objects of life—the telephone and the clocks—and the pianos, drums, and animals nearby.
He doesn’t just want quiet, however; he wants his loss writ large. He wants the life of his
lover—seemingly a normal, average man—to be proclaimed to the world as noble and
valuable. He wants airplanes to write the message “He Is Dead” in the sky, crepe bows
around doves, and traffic policemen wearing black gloves. What seems unbearable to him is
the thought that this man’s passing from life to death will be unmarked by anyone other
than the poet.
In the third stanza the poet reminisces about how much the man who died meant to him. It
is a beautifully evocative section that illustrates the bond between the two; note the theme
of completeness in the language, which covers all four primary compass directions and all
seven days of the week. Similarly, “noon” and “midnight” together cover, by synecdoche
(parts standing for the whole), all hours of the day. The stanza, at the same time, reveals the
tragedy of human life, which is that everyone must die and that almost everyone will
experience being severed from a loved one; love does not, after all, last forever in this
world.

In the fourth stanza the poet’s anguish rings out even more fervently. Here he demands that
Nature heed his grief, calling her to extinguish the stars and the moon and the sun and get
rid of the ocean. He wants the world to reflect the emptiness within him. Human memorials
to the dead will not be sufficient. There is no hope at the end of the poem; the reader is left
with the very real and very bitter sense of the man’s grief, since no end can be achieved
without the poet’s lover.
***
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,
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
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
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
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
Put crépe bows round the white necks of the public doves, Let the traffic policemen wear black
cotton gloves.
More public demands; the speaker wants even the “public doves” – we have a strong
feeling that these are pigeons – to honour the dead man. He wants the traffic police to
acknowledge him, too.
Does the speaker really want us to put bows on pigeons? It seems our man is getting
hyperbolic again.
Lines 9-10
This speaker is so broken up about the experience (and wants everyone else to be broke up
about it, too) because he really loved the dead man. It doesn’t seem like the dead man was
important worldwide. The dead man is someone the speaker knew and loved in daily life.
These lines are incredibly personal, especially when compared to the earlier lines that are
mostly about public mourning. The dead man meant everything to the speaker, so it’s no
wonder he’d like the entire world around him to reflect the fact that the man is dead.
The speaker describes the dead man by saying that he was like a compass for him, and also
like every day of the week for him. He provided direction and filled his time.
***

Lines 11-12
More metaphors. These lines seem to imply that the dead man filled every hour of the
speaker’s day. He brought conversation and joy into the speaker’s life.
While the previous lines were lovely and metaphorical, this one is harsh. Your loved ones will
die. No love lasts forever.
Lines 13-14
The stars are not wanted now: put out every one,
The speaker grows even more depressed in these lines. He demands that someone,
whoever he’s talking to, put out the stars, pack up the moon, and take apart the sun. Now
his grief is so extreme, it’s affecting the way he sees the cosmos.
His extreme, hyperbolic commands are his expressions of his extreme grief. Even though no
one could ever “dismantle the sun,” the speaker’s grief is so intense that he wishes that we
could. All of these romantic and natural images—the stars, the moon, the sun- are too
painful for him. It’s almost as if he wants to blot out everything in the world except his own
mourning.
Lines 15-16
In these final lines, the speaker continues his hyperbolic thinking and asks us to get rid of the
ocean and the wood (by “wood,” he probably means the forests). He doesn’t want to see
any sign of the wonders of nature.
In the last line of the poem, he is totally hopeless, the speaker says that nothing will ever be
good again.
In a lot of elegies (poems like this one that commemorates a person’s death), the speaker
will offer some hope for the future or will talk about how the dead person will live on in
memories and poetry. There’s usually a small moment of optimism buried somewhere in
them but this does not happen in Auden’s “Funeral Blues.” This is just a really sad poem

about death. There is no light at the end of the tunnel for anyone in “Funeral Blues.”
The speaker spends the first stanza of “Funeral Blues” complaining about how much he
wants everyone and everything to be silent. Maybe he wants some peace and quiet to deal
with his thoughts. Maybe he wants to make sure that everyone can hear his lament. Maybe
he wants silence out of respect for the dead man.
Line 1: The speaker wants to cut off personal communication with the world: he wants to
stop the telephone lines from running. He’s looking for isolation. He’s probably being
hyperbolic here, which means that he’s exaggerating his feelings and desires to show just
how sad and hopeless he is.
Line 2: He also wants to stop dogs from barking. Poor dogs. It’s not their fault.
Line 3: Now he’d like people to quit playing the piano, thank you very much. Seems fair
enough. This is a funeral after all.
Lines 3-4: He wants to hear the “muffled drum” of the funeral march. The speaker wants to
hear this and this only. It’s like all other noise is a distraction from what really matters, which
is his pain.
The Public – Symbol Analysis
The speaker is not just concerned with his own reaction to the man’s death. He wants the
acknowledgement of the public, too. Even though we don’t really have much of a reason to
think that the dead beloved is famous or anything, the speaker really desires that this death
be noticed. Perhaps his grief is so consuming, that he wants it to be reflected in the entire
world around him.
Lines 1-4: The speaker wants quiet so that the drum of the funeral march can be heard by the
mourners of the dead man. Once again, he’s being hyperbolic. No one can really expect
every dog in the world to stop barking just because a funeral is happening somewhere in the
world.
Lines 5-6: The speaker asks aeroplanes to proclaim the man’s death through skywriting. It’s
like he wants the whole world to know what he’s going through.

Lines 7-8: He even wants policemen and pigeons to acknowledge the man’s death. Once
again, hyperbole.
Lines 9-12: Compared to the previous lines that deal with the public, these lines seem quiet
and intimate, and we realize what the dead man meant to the speaker. He wants a public
acknowledgement of the man with whom he’s spent his private life.
Nature – Symbol Analysis
Sun, moon, stars…sounds lovely, right? Well, not to our speaker. He wants all these lovely
things – and everything else in nature, it seems – to leave him alone. The grief he feels seems
to have interfered with his ability to appreciate nature.
Line 11: Here, the speaker says that the dead man was everything to him.
Lines 13-16: The speaker calls for us to “put out” the stars, “pack up the moon and dismantle
the sun.” He wants every beautiful thing that nature provides to go away. No more ocean,
no more forests. This guy is so sad that he doesn’t even want the stars around to remind him
of his dead beloved. He’s being hyperbolic, of course; he probably doesn’t actually think that
someone could “dismantle” the sun. But he yearns for this isolation from the natural world
anyway.
Analysis: Form and Meter – Elegy
Elegies can take lots of different shapes and forms since there are no rhyming or metrical
rules for an elegy. “Funeral Blues” is that is written in elegiac stanzas. An elegiac stanza is a
quatrain written in iambic pentameter, usually with the rhyme scheme abab. Here’s where
the “more or less” comes in. “Funeral Blues” is written in quatrains, and it does make use of
iambic pentameter, but it’s highly irregular in its meter, with extra syllables here and shaky
feet there. And the rhyme scheme is tweaked a bit, too: aabb instead of abab. Auden is
using heroic couplets instead of alternating rhymes.
***

Analysis: Speaker
Let’s list what we know about the speaker.
1. We don’t actually know if the speaker is male or female.

2. He/she likes issuing commands and telling people what to do.
3. He’s sad.
The speaker is so sad that he can’t imagine any good or happiness in the future. He’s so
overwhelmed by grief that he’s driven to speak in crazy hyperboles. It’s as if his sadness has
completely changed the way he sees the world around him, and he wants that sadness to be
reflected back to him by everything he sees. The problem is, he exaggerates so consistently
that we may even have trouble taking him seriously sometimes.
Analysis: Setting
This poem is set at a funeral. This isn’t about a small chapel, filled with loved ones in black.
The setting, in many ways, is the whole wide world. The speaker wants that sadness to be
reflected in everything – from the pigeons in the street to the stars in the sky. The true
setting of “Funeral Blues” includes all of those things.
Analysis: Title
The poem is called “Funeral Blues,” It’s a sad song (blues) about a dead man (funeral).
Poetic / language devices
Auden’s images in the opening verse successfully convey the speaker’s sense of loss and
sadness. The speaker’s world has come to an end, and he feels as though his life has been
irreversibly altered. It feels unjust for the world to continue ringing phones and barking dogs
in the face of his loss.
The speaker’s projection of his sadness to his larger surroundings is demonstrated by the
personification of the aeroplanes “moaning’ (line 5), as is the striking image of the words
scrawled on the sky for all to see (line 6).
By comparing the loved one to the points on a compass, the speaker implies that he, the
departed, gave direction and anchoring for him, in addition to being his complete world. The
effect of the loss is heightened further by the explanation that ‘he’ was present for both the

daily grind of work and the ‘Sunday rest’ periods (line 10). We see the richness of the
connection as it offered significance to the many times of the day – and their implications –
and through ‘my chat, my song’ (line 11), was one that thrived through both everyday
discussion and companionship and moments of joy. Line 12 elicits an emotional response due
to its simplicity and the usage of the colon to communicate its sad realisation.
The final verse references images frequently linked with passionate love: a starlit night sky, a
bright moon, a romantic stroll along the beach, or picnics in the woods. These traditions are
obliterated as the speaker demands that all of these symbols be stripped of their
significance because ‘nothing now can ever come to any good’ (line 16).
Auden achieves a wonderful tone balance. The speaker’s sadness is palpable, as is his
sorrow, uncertainty, and even rage or resentment over his loss. However, Auden never
allows the tone to veer too far into sentimentality. As a result of sharing and comprehending
the speaker’s sadness, the grief appears genuine and affecting.
The poem’s flow is consistent, which is aided by the rhyme scheme. This is appropriate for
the title’s ‘Blues’ musical composition. Take note of how the rhythm’s regularity breaks
down in the final line: This echoes the speaker’s complete sadness at his beloved’s demise.
Auden permits the aeroplanes to ‘moan’: the onomatopoeia here helps us to notice the faint
hum of a passing light aircraft. The opening stanza makes good use of sound references,
establishing a contrast between everyday household noises and the demand for silence,
which is interrupted by the solemn, ‘muffled drum’ (line 3) of the funeral procession.
***

Themes of Funeral Blues
Death
The devastating effects that the death of a loved one has on those left behind. He is
heartbroken and cannot see the good in anything now that his loved one has died. He feels
life is pointless without him.
Love
Auden’s poem contradicts the romantic notion of love lasting through eternity. In this poem,
the loss of love is final.
Order and Disorder

When we lose a loved one who provided a sense of meaning and order, chaos can result.
The speaker feels a sense of disorder as a result of losing a relationship that was such an
integral part of his life.
TONE
The opening two stanzas have an authoritative and demanding tone; the speaker uses the
imperative form with “stop all the clocks.” He insists on everyone paying their respects to
the deceased.
The third stanza has a nostalgic tone, with the speaker reminiscing on the deceased’s life.
The final verse is harsh and unreasonable in tone: the speaker insists on the completion of
ludicrous responsibilities. Similarly, the final verse is gloomy and caustic in tone. “nothing
that happens now will ever be beneficial”
Additionally, intense grief, rage, bitterness, and sorrow are used.
The poem’s tone also reflects this melancholy and moving feeling. The references to
mourning rites in the opening stanza emphasise the tone of grief. Stanza 2, particularly the
simple statement ‘He is Dead,’ reaffirms this. Stanza 3’s lovely details build to a gloomy
declaration conveying his shock and grief (‘I thought… incorrect.’). The final verse employs
images evoking sorrow and emotional suffering (‘The stars… one’) as the speaker discusses
how we might as well deconstruct and store the entire globe. The poem’s concluding line
indicates the depth of his despair (‘For nothing… good’). The tone of the poem thus
emphasises the speaker’s severe feelings of sadness and loss throughout. Thus, ‘Funeral
Blues’ paints a realistic and emotional portrait of the immense pain and suffering that the
death of a loved one may bring.

The poem expresses the speaker’s profound grief over the death of a loved one. It is an
affecting and succinct account of his sentiments of loss and despair.
Diction
The poem’s diction confirms the speaker’s world appears to have come to an end. He want
to ‘Stop’ the clocks and ‘Silence’ the telephone; to ‘Prevent’ the dog from barking (by
providing it with a bone); and to ‘Silence’ the pianos. He conveys his despair for the future
by the use of terms such as ‘throw out’ the stars, ‘pack up’ and ‘dismantle’ the moon and
sun, and ‘pour away’ and ‘sweep up’. He also employs terms associated with death and
mourning, such as ‘coffin’ and ‘mourners’, as well as ‘crêpe bows’ and ‘black cotton gloves’.
Imagery
The imagery in the first and second stanzas demonstrates the speaker’s desire to
communicate his profound grief to the world. Not only does he specify fairly normal
mourning measures, such as pausing clocks and utilising muffled drums during the funeral
procession, he also requests that police officers wear ‘black cotton gloves’ and that the
‘public doves’ wear black bows around their necks. He describes his bond with his
sweetheart as’my North, my South, my East, and West’ in the third stanza. The imagery in
the last verse reveals the speaker’s feelings of hopelessness and lack of will to survive. He
wishes to ‘pack up’ or ‘dismantle’ the entire universe, as he explains in the poignant (sad and
moving) final words, ‘nothing now can ever be good.’
Conclusion
Thus, this poem expresses loss and heartbreak. The speaker expresses his anguish and
connects it to the world around him. Through the lens of loss, the references to ‘clocks’,
‘telephones’ (line 1), ‘dogs’ (line 2), and ‘pianos’ (line 3) investigate the mourner’s reaction to
his immediate, domestic circumstances. The poem then expands the environment to include
‘aeroplanes’ (line 5), ‘doves’ (line 7), and ‘traffic policeman’ (line 8), before concluding with
the global sphere of stars (line 13),’ moon’, ‘sun’ (line 14), ‘ocean’, and ‘wood’ (line 15). The
third verse recounts their unique relationship and gives the speaker a detailed description of
what the deceased man meant to him.
With the title ‘Funeral Blues,’ it is immediately evident what the poem’s theme will be. The
term ‘blues’ is an effective one because it may refer to both a dismal mood and a sluggish,
mournful musical work. When the terms ‘coffin’ and ‘mourners’ are spoken, the reader
quickly understands the appeal for everything to come to a halt – time, noise, and music
(line 4). The stern statement ‘He Is Dead’, which is to be inscribed on the sky for all to see,
emphasises the speaker’s desire for the world to acknowledge his beloved’s demise.

“Funeral Blues (Stop all the clocks)” Summary
o Turn off the clocks and cut the telephone cords. Give the dog a juicy bone so it
stops barking. Make the pianos stop playing and then bring out the coffin and
the mourners, accompanied only by a quiet drum.
Let airplanes fly sadly over us and write “He is Dead” in the sky. Put black bows around the
white necks of the pigeons in the street. Make the traffic cops wear black gloves.
He was everything to me: all the points of the compass. He was my work week and my day
off. He was every hour of my day, present in everything I spoke or sang. I thought our love
would never end. That wasn't true.
I don’t want to see the stars anymore: put out their lights. Take the moon out of the sky and
take the sun apart. Pour the ocean down the drain and sweep the forest away. Nothing
good can ever happen again.
“Funeral Blues (Stop all the clocks)” Themes
Grief and Isolation
“Funeral Blues” is a poem about heartbreak and grief—specifically, about the way that
these feelings make people feel isolated from and out of sync with the world around them.
It’s possible to interpret the loss at the heart of the poem in several ways—the speaker
could be grieving the end of a romantic relationship or the death of a loved one. But
regardless of why the speaker grieves, the poem insists that the world doesn’t stop to
grieve with the speaker: the stars keep shining, the clocks keep ticking, and the dogs keep
barking, much to the speaker’s frustration. The world’s indifference highlights the intensely
personal and isolating nature of grief. Grief, the poem argues, can make it feel like your
entire life has come undone—even if the rest of the world doesn’t seem to notice that
anything has changed.
The speaker of “Funeral Blues” has clearly lost someone important. The poem's title
suggests that someone has literally died, and the speaker also asks for “coffin” and
“mourners.” The speaker even demands that “aeroplanes … scribbl[e] on the sky the
message ‘He is Dead.’” Of course, this could also all be metaphorical; the speaker could be
going through a major breakup and using death as a way to talk about these feelings of
heartbreak and loss. The exact cause of this grief isn’t really what’s important here, though.
Instead, the poem focuses on the fact that, even as that this grief seems totally
overwhelming to the speaker, it’s not even a blip on the radar of the rest of the world.

The fact that the world keeps chugging along feels like an affront to the speaker, because it
seems to belittle the speaker’s grief and to disrespect the memory of what the speaker lost.
How, the poem implicitly asks, can everyone else go on when this earth-shattering event has
taken place?
The speaker thus makes a series of grandiose, even hyperbolic, requests: the speaker wants
to stop the clocks. The speaker wants a public funeral, with pigeons wearing black bows
around their necks. The speaker wants the sun, moon, and stars to all stop shining. The
speaker wants the whole world to shut down and grieve.
Over the top as they are, these demands reveal to the reader that the speaker doesn’t want
to grieve alone. The speaker wants the rest of the world to acknowledge and reflect the
magnitude of the speaker’s loss. The poem thus suggests that, whether you've lost a loved
one or had your heartbroken, part of what makes grief so terrible, so hard to endure, is
the isolation it creates. Grief causes a painful separation between the world—indifferent,
unconcerned—and the person who grieves. More broadly, the poem also speaks to the
overwhelming, all-encompassing nature of grief—which can make it feel like the world itself
has ended, and that “nothing now can ever come to any good.”
Where this theme appears in the poem:
 Lines 1-16
***
Line-by-Line Explanation & Analysis of “Funeral Blues (Stop all the clocks)”
o Lines 1-4
Stop all the ...

... the mourners come.
The poem begins with the speaker making a series of urgent requests. The speaker wants to
stop “the clocks,” to turn off the “telephone”, to give the dog a “juicy bone” to keep it from
barking, and to “silence the pianos.” Many of these requests are symbolic. For instance,
when the speaker asks to “stop all the clocks,” the speaker is really asking to stop time
itself. The telephone, meanwhile, might represent modern life and business: the speaker
isn’t asking to “cut off” a specific telephone, but all telephones, and with them their
constant stream of interruptions and information. Finally, the “pianos” symbolize raucous

parties and celebration. Overall, then, the speaker is asking for a moment of peace and
stillness, free from distracting noises, a moment of somber reflection.
In lines 3-4, it becomes clear why the speaker wants this: someone important to the speaker
has died. (It's possible to read this as a literal death, or as a metaphor for the end of an
important relationship.) The speaker is asking the rest of the world to mourn with the
speaker, to acknowledge the magnitude of this loss. But the fact that the speaker has to ask
for the clocks to stop and the telephones to be cut suggest that the world hasn’t stopped to
accommodate the speaker’s grief. In other words, there’s a disconnect between the world
and the speaker. The speaker is heartbroken, and the world seems indifferent to the
speaker’s grief: it keeps moving along, business as usual. As such, the speaker feels isolated
and demands that the world slow down, stop, bring itself in line with the speaker's grief.
The first four lines also establish the poem’s form. The poem is written in quatrains: it has
four stanzas, each with four lines. Each quatrain is composed of
two rhyming couplets (creating an AABB rhyme scheme). The poem uses meter, but its
meter shifts around unpredictably: lines 1, 3, and 4 are in iambic pentameter, while line 2 is
probably best thought of as being in iambic hexameter. Recall that an iamb is a poetic unit
with a da DUM stress pattern; pentameter has five iambs per line, while hexameter has six.
There are also lots of metrical substitutions throughout. The first line, for instance, opens
with a spondee (stressed-stressed) or a trochee (stressed-unstressed), depending on how
it's read; either way, this adds extra emphasis to the speaker's request:
Stop all | the clocks, | cut off | the tel- | ephone

Prevent | the dog | from bark- | ing with | a jui- | cy bone,
Silence the | pia- | nos and | with muf- | fled drum
Bring out | the cof- | fin, let | the mourn- | ers come.
As is clear above, the meter definitely isn't regular. Line 3, for instance, actually opens with
a dactyl (stressed-unstressed-unstressed). Altogether, these shifts in the meter add a sense
of instability to the poem's rhythm.
The poem almost exclusively uses end-stopped lines. This creates a sense that each line is
cut off from the next, a sense which is strengthened by the caesuras that divide lines 1 and 4.
Overall, the poem’s sentences and phrases tend to be discrete. The speaker doesn’t use
coordinating words like “and” or “therefore” to show the reader how each is related to the
next. Instead, the reader has to figure out for themselves how everything fits together. This
is an example of the poetic device asyndeton—a device the speaker uses throughout the
poem. Without such clues about how the speaker’s ideas and requests are related to each

other, the poem feels spontaneous and unplanned—an overflowing of grief that expresses
itself in a turbulent, sometimes disorganized flow of thoughts.
The speaker does give some hints that the reader should try to assemble these discrete
ideas. For example, the speaker uses an alliterative /k/ sound in lines 1 and 4, in words like
“clock,” “cut,” “coffin,” and “come.” Bracketing the stanza, these alliterations suggest an
underlying continuity that runs through the speaker’s grief. And, at times, the speaker
breaks the poem’s pattern, slipping in an enjambment—as line 3. This enjambment falls at a
crucial point in the poem: the first time the speaker admits that someone has
(metaphorically or literally) died. The idea is so upsetting for the speaker that it causes the
poem to skid a little, to lose its confidence.
***

Shmoop
Poem’s Summary
Stanza 1
Lines 1-2

 The poem begins with a series of harsh commands: stop the clocks! Cut off the
telephones!
 We don't know quite who our speaker is yet, but he sounds forceful, even angry.
 And actually, we'll never find out too much about the speaker himself. For the sake of
convenience, we'll refer to the speaker as a "he," but "he" could just as easily be
"she."
 Whoever he 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. But we have
to ask: what dogs? Whose dogs? To whom does the speaker address these lines (and
the poem in general)? His noisy, dog-loving neighbor? Dog-lovers in general?
 There's no one answer to these questions, but since the poem is called "Funeral
Blues," it would be pretty legitimate to propose that the speaker is addressing an
audience of mourners as a funeral. So this is a public poem, in a way—a poem meant
for lots of people to hear.
 And finally, we noticed that these lines are similar in length. Line 1 has ten syllables,
which is a sure as shootin' sign that we're reading iambic pentameter. Line 2, though,
has twelve, and the rhythm is off in both lines, so Auden's keeping us on our toes for
now.
***
Lines 3-4

 Whatever's going on here, 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. Which fits the title. If this is a funeral we're
dealing with, drums are much more solemn and fitting for the occasion than a joyful,
jazzy piano.
 In the next line, he wants the coffin to be brought out and for mourners to come see
it. Maybe the "muffled drum," then, is the sound of mourners walking, or of
pallbearers carrying a coffin. Or maybe it is a 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 to you. Should we really stop the
clocks just because someone has died? Probably not. But the speaker's using a bit
of hyperbole or exaggeration to convey just how important all this mourning
business is.
 But of course when someone's being so over-the-top, it raises the question, how
serious is the speaker? Is he exaggerating to create drama, or does he really feel this
deeply about all this?
 Line 3 has eleven syllables, and line 4 has ten. Shmoop thinks it's 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." A little AABB
action for you.
 Here's a tip for you budding Shmoopoets: 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. Check out our "Form and Meter" section for more on that
fancy term.
Stanza 2
Lines 5-6

Scribbling on the sky the message He is Dead,
 Now things are getting really dramatic. As if stopping the clocks weren't enough, the
speaker would like an airplane to write "He is Dead" in skywriting to commemorate
his grief. If a funeral is a public acknowledgment of death, well then this is a super
public acknowledgement of death. You don't get much more in-your-face than
skywriting.
 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."
 And it's interesting here that 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 acknowledgments of death going on here.
Lines 7-8
 More public demands here, as the speaker wants even the "public doves"—we have
a strong feeling that these are pigeons—to honor the dead man. And he wants even
the traffic police to acknowledge him, too.
 Do these demands seem a little ridiculous to you? Does the speaker really want us to
put bows on pigeons? It seems our man is getting hyperbolic again.
 And what's up with this dead guy? Why does the speaker care so much about how,
where, and by whom he is mourned? Is the dead man the prime minister? A famous
athlete? A poet? Why does he deserve to be publicly mourned? Let's keep reading.

Stanza 3
Lines 9-10
He was my North, my South, my East and West

 Ah, this clears things up a bit. This speaker is so broken up about stuff (and wants
everyone else to be broke up about it, too) because he really loved the dead man. It
doesn't seem like he was the leader of England or a world-class gymnast or anything
like that. The dead man is someone the speaker knew and loved in daily life.
 These lines are incredibly personal, especially when compared to the earlier lines that
are mostly about public mourning. The dead man meant everything to the speaker,
so it's no wonder he'd like all the world around him to reflect the fact that the guy's
dead.
 Metaphor alert. Was the dead man really a calendar of days for the speaker? All the
directions on a compass? Of course not. But in a metaphor, we describe one thing by
way of another thing. So here, the speaker describes the dead man by saying that he
was like a compass for him, and also like every day of the week for him. He provided
direction, and filled his time. It's a more poetic way of saying, "hey, I loved this dude!
He was important to me!"
Lines 11-12
My noon, my midnight, my talk, my song

 More metaphors. These lines seem to imply that the dead man filled every hour of
the speaker's day. He brought conversation and joy into the speaker's life.
 And then BAM. Line 12 hits you over the head.
 While the previous lines were lovely and metaphorical, this one is straight-up harsh.
Your loved ones will die. No love lasts forever. Have fun staying up late at night
thinking about that one, suckers.
***

Stanza 4
Lines 13-14
The stars are not wanted now: put out every one,
 After that devastating line 12, the speaker grows even more mopey in these lines.
Reentering imperative land, he demands that someone, whomever he's talking to,
put out the stars, pack up the moon, and take apart the sun. Now his grief is so
extreme, it's affecting the way he sees the cosmos. This is some serious business.
 Does the speaker expect us to really do this? Of course not. But his extreme,
hyperbolic commands are his expressions of his extreme grief.
 Even though no one could ever "dismantle the sun," the speaker's grief is so intense
that he wishes that we could. All of these romantic and natural images—the stars,
the moon, the sun—are too painful for him. It's almost as if he wants to blot out
everything in the world except his own mourning.
Lines 15-16

 In these final lines, the speaker continues his hyperbolic thinking and asks us to get
rid of the ocean and the wood (by "wood," he probably means the forests). He
doesn't want to see any sign of the wonders of nature because he's so down in the
dumps.
 The last line of the poem is another whammy. Totally hopeless, the speaker mopes
that nothing will ever be good again. Not since this guy's death.
 In a lot of elegies (poems like this one that commemorate a person's death), the
speaker will offer some hope for the future, or will talk about how the dead person
will live on in memories and poetry. There's usually a small moment of optimism
buried somewhere in them. But not in Auden's "Funeral Blues." This is just a really
sad poem about death. There is no light at the end of the tunnel for anyone in
"Funeral Blues."
***
Title
The poem is called "Funeral Blues," and Shmoop thinks that's the perfect title. After all, it's a
sad song (blues) about a dead guy (funeral). Done and done.
As we discuss in our "In a Nutshell" section, the song was set to music before it was
published as a poem. Sure, it may not be bluesy in a musical sense—it really sounds much
more operatic to us—but the title definitely draws out the poem's connection to music, and
the blues comes from the emotion of it, rather than the rhythms. To get a sense of what we
mean, check out a musical rendition of the poem.
Setting
We think you got this one. This poem's set at a funeral. Go ahead, get it out of your
system: duh.
But here's the thing. This isn't about a small chapel, filled with loved ones in black. The
setting, in many ways, is the whole wide world. And the speaker would like it to stop being
awesome for a moment, thank you very much. See, it's not enough that the funeral's full of
sad people. The speaker wants that sadness to be reflected in everything—from the pigeons
in the street to the stars in the sky. The true setting of "Funeral Blues" includes all of those
things.
Speaker
Let's list what we know about the speaker.
1. As we mentioned in our "Summary" of the poem, we don't actually know if the

speaker is male or female (though we've been consistently referring to him as a male
for the sake of simplicity).
2. He likes issuing commands and telling people what to do.
3. He's sad. Like, really, really sad.
It's that last one we're interested in. This guy is so sad that he can't imagine any good or
happiness in the future. He's so overwhelmed by grief that he's driven to speak in
crazy hyperboles. It's as if his sadness has completely changed the way he sees the world
around him, and he wants that sadness to be reflected back to him by everything he sees.

It's serious business. But the problem is, he exaggerates so consistently that we may even
have trouble taking him seriously sometimes.
And that's a bummer, because we believe that this guy is deadly serious. The mourning here
is palpable, and it's no wonder this poem has become so popular at funerals and memorials.
Anyone can relate to this speaker's consuming sorrow. We've been there, buddy.
Form & Meter
Elegy
A dead dude, mourners, a funeral, and a sad speaker? Sounds like an elegy to Shmoop.
Elegies can take lots of different shapes and forms, since there are no rhyming or metrical
rules for an elegy. But the great thing about "Funeral Blues" is that it's written in what are
called elegiac stanzas…more or less.
An elegiac stanza is a quatrain written in iambic pentameter, usually with the rhyme
scheme ABAB. Here's where the "more or less" comes in. "Funeral Blues" is written in
quatrains, and it does make use of iambic pentameter, but it's highly irregular in its meter,
with extra syllables here and wonky feet there. And the rhyme scheme is tweaked a bit, too:
AABB instead of ABAB. Auden is using heroic couplets instead of alternating rhymes.
Still, the shoe fits, if a bit awkwardly.
Shakin' Up the Blues
Now, for the nitty-gritty stuff. Let's look at some of the messier moments, when "Funeral
Blues" shakes up the form and lets its freak flag fly.
Take a look at line 1.
Stop all the clocks, cut off the telephone.
Pretty perfect iambic pentameter, wouldn't you say? But what about the next line?
Prevent the dog from barking with a juicy bone.
Shmoop counts twelve syllables, which means we're likely dealing with a line
of iambic hexameter—that's six iambs all in a row. Auden shakes things up, right at the
beginning of the poem to let us know this won't be your typical elegy.
***
Then line 3 goes
Auden drops in a trochee in the place of an iamb in the first foot of the line. Then, just after
that, he drops in an anapest, which accounts for the extra syllable in the line.
And finally, the last line of the stanza brings us back to the wonderful world of regular old
iambic pentameter:
Bring out the coffin let the mourners come.
Phew. Thank goodness were back to some normalcy.
Why So Wonky?
But of course that raises the question: why does Auden do all this metrical variation in the
first place? To be frank, there are a lot of plausible theories. Auden was known for being a
virtuoso of form, so hey, maybe he's just having a bit of fun. But we think it's more likely that
each choice is a deliberate one.
Take that trochee that starts off line 3. It sure draws a lot of attention to the word "silence."
It practically rings in your ears. And then, there's that super lengthy line 2. Coming after
"stop all the clocks," it sure slows down time a bit, and in a way, it fulfills the command that
came in the previous line. He's clever, that Auden, so what some may write off as sloppiness,
laziness, or even just quirky variations, are more likely deliberate choices.
Silence
The speaker spends the first stanza of "Funeral Blues" jawing about how much he wants
everyone and everything to pipe down. Maybe he wants some peace and quiet to deal with
his thoughts. Maybe he wants to make sure that everyone can hear his lament. Maybe he
wants silence out of respect for the dead man. Whatever the answer may be, he sure does a
bunch of talking about not talking.
 Line 1: The speaker wants to cut off personal communication with the world: he
wants to stop the telephone lines from running. He's looking for isolation. He's
probably being hyperbolic here, which means that he's exaggerating his feelings and
desires to show just how sad and hopeless he is.
 Line 2: He also wants to stop dogs from barking. Poor dogs. It's not their fault.

 Line 3: Now he'd like people to quit playing the piano, thank you very much. Seems
fair enough. This is a funeral after all.
 Lines 3-4: He wants to hear the "muffled drum" of the funeral march. The speaker
wants to hear this and this only. It's like all other noise is a distraction from what
really matters, which is his pain.
The Public
The speaker is not just concerned with his own reaction to the man's death. He wants the
acknowledgment of the public, too. Even though we don't really have much of a reason to
think that the dead beloved is famous or anything, the speaker really desires that this death
be noticed. Perhaps his grief is so consuming, that he wants it to be reflected in all the world
around him.
 Lines 1-4: The speaker wants quiet so that the drum of the funeral march can be
heard by the mourners of the dead man. Once again, he's being hyperbolic. No one
can really expect every dog in the world to stop barking just because a funeral is
happening somewhere in the world. But hey, a guy can dream.
 Lines 5-6: The speaker asks airplanes to proclaim the man's death though skywriting.
It's like he wants the whole world to know what he's going through.
 Lines 7-8: He even wants policemen and pigeons to acknowledge the man's death.
Once again, hyperbole.
 Lines 9-12: Compared to the previous lines that deal with the public, these lines seem
quiet and intimate, and we realize what the dead man meant to the speaker. He
wants a public acknowledgment of the man with whom he's spent his private life.
Nature
Sun, moon, stars…sounds lovely, right? Well, not to our speaker. He wants all these lovely
things—and everything else in nature, it seems—to leave him alone. The grief he feels
seems to have interfered with his ability to appreciate nature, which is a big bummer,
because we hear camping trips are awesome cures for the blues.
 Line 11: Here, the speaker says that the dead man was everything to him. Even times
of the day. Even midnight itself. These metaphors are hyperbolic, but hey, let's cut
the guy some slack. He's been through a lot.

 Lines 13-16: The speaker calls for us to "put out" the stars, "pack up the moon and
dismantle the sun." He wants every beautiful thing that nature provides to go away.
No more ocean, no more forests. This guy is so sad that he doesn't even want the
stars around to remind him of his dead beloved. He's being hyperbolic, of course; he
probably doesn't actually think that someone could "dismantle" the sun. But he
yearns for this isolation from the natural world anyway.
***

Funeral Blues by W. H. Auden

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Funeral Blues by W. H. Auden

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Funeral Blues by W.H.

Stop all the clocks, cut off the telephone,

Let aeroplanes circle moaning overhead

He was my North, my South, my East and West,

Form and Tone