The Immensity of Grief

Nearly every single line of the poem “Funeral Blues” attests to the immensity of the speaker’s grief in the wake of his beloved’s death. As the poem moves along from stanza to stanza, the magnitude of the images also grows and expands. The speaker begins by commanding an unknown addressee to silence all the objects in his house – his immediate domestic surroundings – and to terminate all contact with the outside world, as represented by the “telephones” (1). The ordinariness of the conventional funeral preparations here, as the speaker asks for the “coffin” and the “mourners” (4), contrasts starkly with the overblown nature of the actions put forth in the next stanza.

In the second stanza, he moves to the humanly constructed, artificial outside world, marking a change from gestures of silencing and suppression to gestures of addition, for instance altering the “public doves...