FUNERAL BLUES

Funeral Blues, by W. H. Auden, is a poem made up of four quatrains. It expresses the grief of the author for the dead of his dear beloved.

In each stanza there are two rhyming couplets and each one is different from the previous one for its content: while the first one refers to something concrete on the ground, the second one is about something concrete in the air, the third one of something abstract and the fourth one shows an apocalyptic vision of the world. The whole poem goes on with growing tension as does the pain expressed. There is intensity of pain and a different reaction in the poet's mind for each stanza.

In the first quatrain the poet wants total silence from the world to keep his pain inside him. In the second one the pain is more visible and he wants everybody to know what has happened. In the following one the pain is so strong that he loses any sense of life direction .

In the end, the poet is so desperate that he no longer cares about the world and  life and wants their total destruction.

In the third part the anaphora the possessive adjective “my”, underlines the total confusion of the poet’s mind.