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Sound Versus Silence

An opposition between sound and silence is present throughout “Funeral Blues.” This opposition appears clearly in the opening stanza, where the speaker insists on the need for quiet (lines 1–4):

Stop all the clocks, cut off the telephone,
Prevent the dog from barking with a juicy bone,
Silence the pianos and with muffled drum
Bring out the coffin, let the mourners come.

For the grief-stricken speaker, clocks, telephones, dogs, and pianos all make unwelcome sounds that must be silenced. The speaker desires silence in part to soothe the grief. However, silence is also necessary to establish the appropriate degree of solemnity required for a funeral. The only sound the speaker wishes to hear is that of the “muffled drum” that accompanies procession of their loved one’s coffin. In contrast to the first stanza’s call for the carefully managed silence of an interior space, the second stanza turns to the outside world and its various noises. The speaker references “aeroplanes . . . moaning overhead” that write messages in the air, causing the sky to speak “He is Dead” (lines 5 and 6). The speaker also implicitly invokes the wing-flapping sounds of “public doves” as well as the orchestra of engines and horns conducted by “traffic policemen” (lines 7 and 8). In the final stanza, as the speaker succumbs to a new wave of grief, the poem concludes with a call for earth and the heavens to be dismantled, leaving behind the absolute silence of the cosmic void.

Imperatives

The speaker of Auden’s poem consistently uses verbs in the imperative mood. In fact, all the sentences in stanzas 1, 2, and 4 feature the imperative. In grammatical terms, the imperative mood is used to issue commands, give instructions, or offer advice. The speaker uses the imperative in the first stanza to call for everything that makes noise—clocks, telephones, dogs, pianos—to be silenced. In the second stanza, the speaker demands that the outside world show signs of mourning for the loss of the loved one. Only in the third stanza does the speaker relinquish the imperative mood and reflect on the magnitude of his or her loss. Yet this reflection initiates an even stronger wave of grief that returns the speaker to the earlier mood, this time demanding for the heavens and the earth to be dismantled. The consistent use of imperatives in the poem has a twofold effect. On the one hand, the demands the speaker makes grow increasingly unreasonable, which reflects growing anguish. On the other hand, the use of imperatives implies a desire for control, suggesting that the speaker is also attempting to regain control over his or her emotional instability.

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