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“Funeral Blues” consists of four rhyming quatrains with an underlying iambic meter. These formal elements approximate what’s known as the elegiac stanza, which is a stanza type that’s closely associated with poems of mourning. Traditionally, the elegiac stanza features iambic pentameter lines and an alternating ABAB rhyme scheme. Auden’s poem doesn’t follow either of these formal elements precisely. For example, although the baseline meter is iambic pentameter, Auden introduces many rhythmic variations and includes tetrameter as well as hexameter lines. The poem’s rhyme scheme is more regular, but it follows an AABB pattern instead of an ABAB pattern. Thus, even though the poem is an elegy for a lost loved one, the quatrains in “Funeral Blues” don’t quite satisfy the formal requirements for an elegiac stanza. In a sense, it seems that the speaker’s emotional destabilization in the wake of loss has influenced the poem’s formal structure. The sheer force of the speaker’s grief might be said to have “broken” the elegy.

If the speaker has indeed broken—or perhaps just disrupted—conventional elegiac form, it’s because the speaker’s whole world has come crashing down. When taken in sequence, the poem’s four stanzas trace the development of the speaker’s grieving process. In the first stanza, the speaker issues a series of commands, declaring that the world should stop in observance of the loved one’s funeral (lines 3–4):

Silence the pianos and with muffled drum
Bring out the coffin, let the mourners come.

The speaker extends this demand in the second stanza, calling for the world to show signs that it mourns the same loss (lines 5–6):

Let aeroplanes circle moaning overhead
Scribbling on the sky the message ‘He is Dead.’

The third stanza marks the poem’s climax, where the speaker fully reckons with the significance of the loss. Here, the speaker stops making demands of the world and turns to his or her own grief, acknowledging the despair now felt that this loved one is irretrievably lost: “I thought that love would last forever: I was wrong” (line 12). In the wake of this recognition, the speaker returns focus to the world. Now, though, the profundity of grief leads the speaker to call for the world’s end (lines 15–16):

Pour away the ocean and sweep up the wood;
For nothing now can ever come to any good.

For the speaker, the loss of his or her loved one feels like the end of the world.

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