Why I love "Funeral Blues"

    "Funeral Blues" by W. H. Auden, was first published in 1938 in it's final form, having been based on an earlier version that was published in 1936. The poem is an elegy so it is written in elegiac stanzas, yet the meter is irregular, using heroic couplets to produce an AABB rhyme scheme. The poem can be found under numerous titles and was intended to be set to music.
    I love "Funeral Blues" due to its universal theme, death. The poem explores the way in which time does not cease when a loved one has died even though time becomes irrelevant to the mourners. The poem is composed of four stanzas and the very first line depicts this thought, "Stop all the clocks, cut off the telephone" (1). This line represents time and communication in a physical way, clocks being a tool to keep time and telephones being a device for communication. The imperative tone in the first line illustrates a speaker suffering with grief and responding with anger. This is a common response to death and creates a realistic impression from the start. As the stanza continues the speaker requests to, "Silence the pianos and with the muffled drum /  Bring out the coffin, let the mourners come" (3-4). This is another command to acknowledge the death that has occurred, wanting the sound of drums over the cheerful tones of a piano. In the third stanza the speaker uses metaphors to represent how personal the death is, "He was my North, my South, my East and West" (9). This metaphor illustrates how the person was like a compass to the speaker, a sense of direction. I found this line to be incredibly power. The twelfth line in the stanza creates more emotion by using "I", "I thought that love would last forever, I was wrong" (12). This line further depicts the fact that life does not last forever, everyone will lose someone just like everyone will die. In the fourth stanza Auden uses hyperbolic statements to exaggerate the grief, "Pack up the moon and dismantle the sun" (14). By once again using imperative to do something as unrealistic as "packing up the moon" the grief the speaker feels can be seen as large as nature itself.
     "Funeral Blues" is a relatively simple poem to understand but it is full of emotion and power. The theme is universal so that almost any reader can relate to the grief the speaker is feeling. I appreciate when a poem does not try and sugarcoat something as final as death, there is no bright side at the end of this elegy.
http://allpoetry.com/poem/8493081-Funeral_Blues-by-W_H_Auden