Commentaire de littérature anglaise, funeral blues

FUNERAL BLUES        

        Funeral Blues is a poem composed by W.H Auden in 1938. It deals with death and how the poet reacts when his beloved dies.

        The question is to know how Auden manages to convey his feelings.

We will first study what he wants us to do, then what his lover represented for him, in order to understand why he wrote such a poem.

        At the beginning of the poem we notice that it starts with the word “Stop”, which means the end of something. The poet gives orders, he wants to “cut off the telephone” and “Stop all the clocks”, Auden wants to have a break, to cut him of the reality. People used to think that clocks were symbols of bad luck, especially when a clock went running with a dead person. There is another sign of bad luck : the dog who is barking make people believe that more people would be dying. He wants to stop all the noises, all sounds of life.

        In the second stanza Auden reveals that he has a lover who is dead and he wants to let everybody know it by “scribbling” on the sky the message He is Dead”, by this way everybody can see his message. To speak about the person who is dead he uses the pronoun “he” so we can say that he assumes his homosexuality with a public announcement.

        Auden comes back to earth with a bump when his lover is dead and when he realizes that his idea of love which last forever proves wrong. He tought that “love would last for ever”, but finally he is wrong and realizes it.

        He has no point of reference, he lost the notion of time because his lover meant his “working week', his “noon, midnight” and his “Sunday rest”, the only day he can laze and do not work. The poet is totally lost without his lover and compares him to “North, South, East and West”, the four cardinal points. He has no landmarks. The dead person was his talk, now he can't communicate, he can't talk without him. He represents everything for him.

        We can notice the use of hyperbole when he compares his lover to cardinal points and synecdotes. Without him there is no hope, and “For nothing less can ever come to any good”, according to him, nothing would make him happy, nobody can help him, he doesn't want to love anymore, he lost his reason to live, his love of his life and there is nothing to do.

        Auden writes a poem in order to show us how much the death can be terrible when you lose someone you love, the feelings of suffering and of being lost. It can be the end of “your world” and it is his case. He is deeply affected by the loss of his lover. He wants to express his grief because he can't speak since his friend is dead, so writing poetry becomes a way of expressing for him. This poem is like a lyric song, first it is because of the rhythm. Moreover, the title of the poem “Funeral Blues” makes us think that the Blues is a music style but it is also an expression to define the grief, the sadness and dark ideas. Auden does not want to forget his lover and to feel better “for nothing”, he prefers suffer and be sad than forget him.

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