ANALYSIS OF
“FUNERAL BLUES”
And
“IN MEMORY OF W.B YEATS”
BY W.H AUDEEN
SUBMITTED BY
1620624 ŞÜKRÜ ÖZ
1620251 AHMET OKKAN
FUNERAL BLUES BY AUDEN
Stop all the clocks, cut off the telephone,
Prevent the dog from barking with the juicy bone.
Silence the pianos and, with muffled drum,
Bring out the coffin. Let the mourners come.
Let aeroplanes circle moaning overhead
Scribbling in the sky the message: “He is dead!”
Put crepe bows around 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 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 come to any good.
Funeral Blues is about someone, we think, losing a loved one. It seems like a poem of passionate love for someone, for when they pass everything must stop as they did, die and never start again. Even the name of the poem suggest that death is the one of the painful feeling as the color “blue” represents a sense of grief and mourning. After each stanza we as the reader feel more involved and feel more grief for the person lost, it is a time of mourning. This feeling is demonstrated with a great breathtaking line at the end of the poem when he says 'For nothing now can ever come to any good.' When we lose someone by whose existence we feel relaxed and a sense of happiness, the world becomes unbearable and everything happening around us turns out to be dull and unimportant. We don’t sense any desire to wake up in the painful mornings knowing the fact that person we lost will be never in our life in the earthly eye. Auden conveys us all the grief and what an individual can perceive by the lost of beloved in a perfect and sensitive way. However, mourning is considered to