142 Poetry for Students

cal universe, the speaker expects little, since “noth-

ing now can ever come to any good.”

Style

Auden presents “Funeral Blues” as an elegy to a

loved one who is deceased. The poem presents a

mixture of traditional and nontraditional elements,

reflecting one of its dominant themes: order and

disorder. Its somber tone is reflected in its four qua-

trains (four-line stanzas), each containing two cou-

plets (end rhyme pattern aabb), and a regular me-

ter of four feet per line. Yet Auden has not chosen

a standard rhythmic pattern. Instead he shifts

groups of stressed and unstressed syllables that ef-

fectively disrupt the poem’s rhythm. This coupling

of ordered and unordered patterns symbolizes the

speakers efforts, and final failure, to reestablish or-

der in his life after suffering the devastating loss of

a loved one.

This mixture of traditional and nontraditional

elements continues in the poem’s overall structure

as well as its rhyme scheme. “Funeral Blues” does

incorporate a syncopated blues rhythm and melan-

cholic tone, as its title suggests, but does not fol-

low the traditional blues structure. Blues are char-

acteristically short (three-line stanzas) and marked

by frequent repetition. Often the first line in each

stanza is repeated in the second.

Historical Context

Modernism

Auden’s early poetry was Modernist in style,

but as Richard Johnson noted in his article on Au-

den in The Dictionary of Literary Biography,in the

1930s “he was creating something quite new to

modern poetry, a civil style. His reputation at the

time was for a certain casualness in his writing.”

The Modernist period in England is usually con-

sidered to have begun with World War I in 1914

and ended during the depression years in the 1930s.

Modernist poets like T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound re-

volted against traditional literary forms, replacing

the standard flow of poetic language with frag-

mented phrases and broken lines. Modernists

vowed, in Ezra Pound’s terms, to “make it new.”

They created new poetic structures and styles as

they introduced new and sometimes shocking sub-

ject matter. Writers employed this type of experi-

mentation in order to reveal a truer reflection of the

inner self. Their poems often protested the sterility

of society in the early part of the twentieth century

and expressed a sense of the speaker’s alienation

Funeral Blues

Compare

&

Contrast

• 1936:Edward VIII abdicates the English throne
  to marry Wallis Simpson, an American di-
  vorcee.
  1998:The House of Representatives approves
  two articles of impeachment against American
  President William Clinton as a result of his re-
  lationship with Monica Lewinsky, a young
  White House intern.
  1999:The Senate acquits the President on both
  impeachment charges. The scandal however,
  has severely damaged his reputation.


• 1936:Adolph Hitler reoccupies the Rhineland
  on March 7.

1939:Great Britain enters World War II.

2000:Economically and politically, the United

States has become the most powerful nation in

the world.

• 1936: The British Broadcasting Corporation
  (BBC), a publicly owned institution, sets up the
  world’s first electronic television system.

2000:The BBC is watched more than any other

single broadcaster in the United Kingdom.

Shows produced by the BBC, especially histor-

ical series and comedies retain their popularity

with American viewers.