The Speaker

The unnamed speaker, whose first-person perspective moves the poem forward, is ostensibly the person to whom the deceased meant the most. The whole of “Funeral Blues” is an attempt to represent the speaker’s grief and disbelief at his beloved’s death, by instructing time, the world, and life itself to stop. Previously, he hoped and held onto the illusion that “love would last forever” (12), and only now realizes painfully that “I was wrong” (12). He has lost all hope and desires for everything in the world to be extinguished, like his beloved: “nothing now can ever come to any good” (16).

The Deceased

The deceased loved one, who is also unnamed, never appears in the poem except through his death, and therefore his absence. We know nothing about the person that the deceased loved one actually was in life. The only way we glimpse him is through his...