Funeral Blues
Stop all the clocks, cut off the telephone,
Prevent the dog from barking with a juicy bone,
Silence the pianos and with a muffled drum
Bring out the coffin, let the mourners come.
Let aeroplanes circle moaning overhead
Scribbling on the sky the message 'He is dead'.
Put crepe bows round 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 my Sunday rest,
My noon, my midnight, my talk, my song:
I thought that love would last for ever: 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 ever come to any good.
-W.H Auden
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Language Features/Techniques within Funeral Blues
1. 'Scribbling on the sky'. The sky cannot scribble and neither can the plane so it is a bit of Pathetic Fallacy and Personification. It was used to show how the message was presented to them in the sky. I think it works because it is a great way of writing about the message and giving the sky human qualities. Planes also cannot moan so that is personification.
2. 'The stars are not wanted now; put out every one, pack up the moon and dismantle the sun.' This is a little dramatic, right? A hyperbole. Obviously, you cannot do any of those things and emotions are getting the better of the writer. Wanting to rid the sky of the stars, moon, and sun must be how they are feeling because they may have spent a lot of time with their lost one underneath those three things. I think it works though because it is showing us how lost they are without their lost one and how they think the sun, moon and stars do not matter anymore because the person who died was everything to them.
3. 'He was
my North,
my South,
my East and West,
my working week and
my Sunday rest,
my noon,
my midnight,
my talk,
my song.' That is a lot of 'my's. Repetition. This was probably used to show the readers that he was not everyone's North, South, East or West, he was not everyone's working week, Sunday rest, noon, midnight, talk or song. He was the writer's. I think it works because it shows us that the lost one may not have been everyone else's everything, but he was the writer's everything. By this, I think the person who died, was very very close to them. I would think the writer was the mother, father, sibling, or significant other of the guy who died.
