Funeral Blues by the late British-American poet W.H. Auden (1907 – 1973).
W. H. Auden’s “Funeral Blues”, (Also known as “Stop all the clocks,” a reference to its first line), is a powerful poem that captures the overwhelming grief of losing a loved one.
It first appearing in a 1936 play W. H. Auden and Christopher Isherwood called “The Ascent of F6”. The poem was later substantially rewritten and published in its familiar form in 1938.
Through commanding language, stark imagery, and a movement from everyday surroundings to the wider universe, Auden portrays a speaker whose loss feels so immense that time, nature, and society itself should come to an immediate halt.
The poem ultimately explores how bereavement can transform a once-meaningful world into one that seems almost empty and without hope.
Funeral Blues
(Read here by award winning English character actor Simon Callow.)
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.
END.
Leave a Reply