Funeral Blues by W. H. Auden

             Auden writes the poem, "Funeral Blues," in 1940 (802). In the poem, "Funeral Blues," Auden talks about the loss of a person's loved one and feels as if their life is over. The main theme of "Funeral Blues" is death. After the death of the speaker's loved one, he is full of grief, and depression. There isn't a happy ending in this poem, it's all about sadness, and death. Their loved one meant the world to them, and now that their loved one is gone, the speaker doesn't know how to go on with life without them. Auden talks about a person's grief and creates a very sad and depressing feeling. This is based on Auden's choice of words and sentence structure. He creates the depressing mood in the first stanza by using requests, as if he wanted the whole world to come to an end. The speaker expresses his feelings of grief: "Stop all the clocks, cut off the telephone. Prevent the dog from barking with a juicy bone" (2). The speaker basically calls silence from everyone, he also wants the clocks to stop ticking, the phone to stop ringing, the dog to be quiet and every form of normal, everyday life to stop.
             In the second stanza, the speaker doesn't just want quiet, he wants his loss to be known: "Let aeroplanes circle moaning overhead. Scribbling on the sky the message He Is Dead" (6). He wants the life of his lover to be known as if he was a big and important man. In the third stanza the speaker starts to think back about how much the man who died meant to him. In lines 9-10, the speaker says, "He was my North, my South, my East and West. My working week and my Sunday rest" (10). And in this stanza he really explains the bond him and his lover had, and how much his lover really meant to him. In the third stanza, the last sentence reveals the worst part of human life, that everyone will die and that almost everyone will experience being separated from their loved one.