FUNERAL BLUES
The poem "Funeral Blues" was written by H.W. Auden in 1976. It is part of the collection of poems "Tell me the Truth about Love". From the title  the reader understands the  poem is about the death of a beloved person and the sadness of the poet.

The word "Blues" itself refers to a kind of music expressing melancholic feelings so the poem itself recalls a song dedicated to one partner's funeral.

The poem is made up of sixteen lines subdivided into four stanzas. Every stanza deals with a different topic.
The first stanza is about the silent context that should accompany the funeral and has the function to introduce the atmosphere.
The second tells the reader what the poet would like to be done in order to remember the dead partner. His death should not be oobject of a personal inner pain, but rather one of a public mourning, felt  by the whole community. The poet writes: "Let the airplanes... Le onlyt the traffic policemen...", as if everybody had to do something to remember him.
The third stanza describes what his partner represented for him. Through the anaphoric use of "my", the poet underlines the dead person's importance and his main role in his world.
The feelings are underlined again in the fourth stanza,  where the poet expresses his desperation. After his partner's death, no single reference point  exists anymore in his life and therefore he has  lost  trust in the world for the future.
The succession of stanzas takes the poet's sorrow to a climax culminating  in the fourth stanza.
The poem has a slow and solemn rhythm, underlined by the rhyming couplet.
The most frequent verb tense is the imperative highlighting the poet's will to remember and the strength of his desperation and feelings. However, the imperatives do not address someone specific but they are rather  inner and vane commands to the world.