Stop All The Clocks Analysis

Death is an unavoidable occurrence in life, but the forms vary in the way that people may describe a death or may be a feeling of what might feel like death. Both W.H. Auden who wrote the poem Stop all the Clocks and Gwen Harwood who wrote the poem Barn Owl have both shown the idea of death in their poems. In the first part of the poem Barn Owl a child at a rebellious age, experiments with the constraints of authority in an attempt to seek control for herself, as the child sneaks out to kill a barn owl with her father’s shotgun. Through the child’s disobedience of her ‘old No-sayer,’ here referring to her father , she gains knowledge and an insight, primarily between the binary oppositions of life and death and consequences that arise.
W. H. Auden's poem, "Stop all the clocks, cut off the telephone" conveys the meaning of overwhelming grief, tragic loss, and an unrelenting pessimism best exemplified in the last lines, "For nothing now can ever come to any good." The tone of the poem is that of a melancholy sadness enforced by the internal rhyme scheme (aabb) and the melodic iambic pentameter used. As has been shown in the poem Stop all the Clocks the child in Barn Owl is demonstrating the death of something by something of someone passing or has already died . t he consequences of the child's rebellion is reflected in the ugliness of death. The use of low modality language to describe the owl: "This obscene bundle of stuff." as if to emphasise the child's inability to comprehend their