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.
[W.H. Auden]
About the author
W.H. Auden (1907-1973) was an English-American poet admired for his virtuosic command of language and diverse subject matter. Born in York, England, Auden became a prominent literary voice in the 1930s as a leading light of a group of left-leaning poets, including Stephen Spender and Cecil Day-Lewis. Over his illustrious career, Auden penned some of the 20th century’s most enduring verse, from political works like “Spain” to the achingly personal “Lullaby.” Auden wrote “Funeral Blues,” an emotionally raw elegy, in 1936 and published it the next year as part of The Ascent of F6, a play he co-wrote with Christopher Isherwood.
The meaning of the poem
Funeral Blues captures the visceral anguish of losing a loved one. Written from the perspective of a bereaved lover, the poem demands that the world itself grind to a halt. “Stop all the clocks” to properly acknowledge the enormity of this loss. He wants everyday life and its mundane noises to stop; even the dog’s bark seems like an affront when muted by a “juicy bone.”
As the poem unfolds, stark imagery (“crepe bows” and “black cotton gloves”) thrusts readers into a funeral setting. A haunting irony emerges: the all-encompassing nature of the departed’s impact contrasts the total apathy of the wider world. Lines like “He was my North, my South, my East and West” underscore how completely our beloved can define our world and give it meaning. The jarring final stanza shocks us into grasping how death obliterates the logic of our lives. The poem rails against the cruelty of a universe that can allow feelings of complete love and connection to be severed permanently—”nothing now can ever come to any good.”
But as much as Funeral Blues expresses raging grief, it is a stirringly beautiful love poem. Auden immortalises their bond by cataloguing the myriad ways his partner was central to his existence. In a sense, poetry becomes a bulwark against the finality of death, capable of preserving the most profound human experiences even after we’re gone.
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