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The Destabilizing Power of Grief

The most central theme in “Funeral Blues” relates to the destabilizing power of grief. The poem’s speaker has recently survived the loss of a loved one. This event feels like it has drained the world of meaning and made it so that “nothing now can ever come to any good” (line 16). The speaker explicitly indicates the apocalyptic magnitude of grief in the concluding stanza, calling for the heavens and the earth to be dismantled and packed away (lines 13–15):

The stars are not wanted now; put out every one,
Pack up the moon and dismantle the sun,
Pour away the ocean and sweep up the wood

So devastating is the speaker’s grief that he or she feels no support from the very structures of the universe. Auden also reflects this theme of instability on the level of form. For example, consider the poem’s unstable meter. “Funeral Blues” never completely settles into a consistent rhythm, and the individual lines of the poem vary between four, five, and six metrical feet. Despite the many commands the speaker issues in an attempt to exert control over the situation, the power of grief proves profoundly destabilizing.

Isolation in the Wake of Loss

Just as grief is emotionally destabilizing, suffering the loss of a loved one can make a person feel isolated. The speaker of “Funeral Blues” doesn’t explicitly remark on the feeling of isolation. However, the language of the opening stanza does subtly communicate the sense of being alone in the grief (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.

Throughout this stanza, the speaker speaks solely in commands. But who is the speaker commanding? In a sense, the speaker is issuing these commands to the world at large, which goes on as though nothing has happened. Clocks keep ticking, the phone keeps ringing, dogs keep barking, and music keeps playing. In other words, the world doesn’t seem to register the speaker’s loss. Alone in grief, then, the speaker commands the world to stop and come alongside to mourn. The speaker continues in this mode in the second stanza, where more commands are issued for a public expression of grief. However, the commands ultimately seem wishful, and the speaker is left to navigate the sorrow alone. This isolation ultimately leads the speaker, in the final stanza, to reject the whole world, claiming that “nothing now can ever come to any good” (line 16).

The Presence of an Underlying Order

Despite the speaker’s feeling that his or her world has come crashing down, Auden introduces subtle signs of an underlying order that persists in the face of apparent instability and collapse. Perhaps the most obvious suggestion of an underlying order comes through Auden’s perfectly regular rhyme. Each of the poem’s four quatrains follows a strict AABB rhyme scheme, and all the rhymes are exact matches. These rhymes exist in a generative tension with the instability of the meter. This tension between meter and rhyme suggests that, despite the acute feelings of grief and loss that have unsettled the speaker, an underlying sense of order and stability still reigns. Auden subtly amplifies this sense of order through the sonic qualities of the language itself, which features an abundance of assonance and consonance. These terms refer, respectively, to the use of repeating vowel and consonant sounds in sequential or nearby words. The repetition of similar sounds creates a subtle suggestion of order and coherence that stands in contrast to the speaker’s emotional chaos.

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