Funeral Blues Essay

801 Words4 Pages
Monica Gaber English 102 Poetry Analyst “Funeral Blues” by W.H. Auden W.H.Auden’s focuses on death as an irreversible phenomenon though people die, this analysis of "Funeral Blues" that the relationships with those loved one don't. Auden’s “Funeral Blues” is an elegy, a poem of mourning, in this case for a recently deceased friend. Its title has multiple meanings. It alludes perhaps to the music played at New Orleans funerals, it reflects the “blues” that the speaker himself is experiencing over this sudden and painful loss, and it references the poem itself, the expression of sadness through words, meter and rhyme. As a whole, the poem pays tribute to an individual who was the center of the speaker’s affection and conveys the emotional devastation of loss and the disillusionment with life that often accompanies it. To the ones associated with the dead person, time had come to a standstill. All communication had been cut off, and therefore the telephone, a metaphor of contact and communication has to be cut off. The dog barking with a juicy bone is silenced as instinct no longer reigns. The piano and drum are relegated as the harmony and beat of life has ceased. The coffin has to be brought, and the mourner has to be given their time of agony and heartbreak to have the process of mourning. The poem begins with a series of imperatives in which the speaker demands that all mundane noises―ticking clocks, ringing telephones, and barking dogs be silenced. The use of a spondee makes the initial command even more passionate, reflecting the speaker’s determination that this otherwise ordinary day be a singularly solemn one. Even the funeral music, the “pianos” and “muffled drum” (line 3), are intentionally muted. This is no occasion for joyous or frivolous sound. In the second stanza the speaker bids “airplanes” circling overhead to “[Scribble] on the sky the
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