The following version of this poem was used to create this guide: "Funeral Blues." Auden, W.H. https://medium.com/poem-of-the-day/w-h-auden-funeral-blues-8771e2868595.

Note that all parenthetical citations within the guide refer to the line number from which the quotation is taken.

“Funeral Blues” is a semi-formal verse poem split into four regular stanzas, written by British-American poet W.H. Auden. Each stanza of the poem consists of two rhyming couplets, following an AABB rhyme scheme. Auden first wrote the poem (in a very different form) in his 1936 play The Ascent of F6, a theatrical piece swelling with political satire and disillusionment. Within the play, the earlier version of “Funeral Blues” was used to mock the performative ostentation involved in organizing a state funeral for a corrupt political leader. Later, in order to rewrite the poem for a cabaret singer and to set it to music, Auden retained the first two stanzas from the original version of the poem, but replaced the final three stanzas with two. He did this so that the poem could be read more convincingly as a sincere act of mourning the death of a loved one, rather than a mere satire of human foibles. In its present iteration, “Funeral Blues” has become one of Britain’s most well-known modern love poems.

Though Auden was celebrated for the social and political commentary latent in his poetry, psychological and emotional themes remained essential to his idea of his own work. On top of diagnosing society’s ills, he felt a strong need to portray an inner psychic world. He believed in poetry as a kind of therapy, performing a function akin to psychoanalysis. It makes sense then to see “Funeral Blues” as a way for the speaker to exorcize and work through the intense grief he feels at his loved one’s passing.

The entirety of “Funeral Blues” is fraught with pain and grief. The speaker makes use of a series of imperatives, commanding the world around him to cease its operations. For him, it is as though time and space must stop. Life itself cannot continue without his beloved. Starting with smaller, more ordinary domestic imagery like clocks, telephones, and pianos, the speaker gradually expands the scope of his grief to include objects in his external environment, and finally the very seasons and rhythms of nature. The poem concludes on a note of futility and a loss of hope.