Volume 10 147
poet claims, there is no need to go on living, so
there is no need to preserve the sun or moon or any-
thing else that sustains human existence.
The poet’s exaggerations materialize in the
form of the poem as well as in its content. The dom-
inant line here is a ten-syllable line, as occurs in
“Stop all the clocks, cut off the telephone” and
“Bring out the coffin, let the mourners come.” But
many of the other lines extend to eleven or even
twelve syllables, as in “Tie crepe bows round the
white necks of the public doves” and “Let the traf-
fic policemen wear black cotton gloves.” These ex-
tra syllables may represent the excess of feeling
which cannot be contained within the limits of lan-
guage: the speaker’s emotions spill out beyond ten
syllables, requiring surplus beats to accommodate
them. These longer lines may also symbolize how
the speaker feels his loss extends beyond his pri-
vate world into the public realm. The poet demands
that airplanes moan and scribble “on the sky the
message He Is Dead” for all to see. He believes
that everyone will suffer as a result of his friend’s
death and that everyone and everything (including
animals, machines, and objects in nature) should
participate in his lament.
The speaker’s distress is so vast because the
deceased person was, in life, his lover: “He was my
North, my South, my East and West, / My work-
ing week, and my Sunday rest, / My noon, my mid-
night, my talk, my song....” It might seem that the
poet likens his lover to a compass and a calendar,
as if to suggest how his lover helped him to define
who he was and where he existed. But his lover
was more the means by which to determine phys-
ical location or measure time: he wasphysical lo-
cation, he wastime. Because the lover was every-
thing that verifies and constitutes life, geography
and temporality no longer have any meaning for
the poet. Even more than this, the lover was “my
talk, my song,” identifying him with speech, lan-
guage, and poetry, which are all of immeasurable
value to a poet. The lover was the tool by which
the poet expressed and understood himself, and
now that tool is gone.
If it is not evident from the language of “Fu-
neral Blues,” it is clear from the other lyrics in the
sequence “Twelve Songs” that the speaker is male
and that their passion did not meet with the ap-
proval of conventional society. In the fourth song,
Auden speaks of kissing his lover, “Indifferent to
those / Who sat with hostile eyes” directed toward
the pair. In “Autumn Song,” the sixth poem, “Whis-
pering neighbours left and right / Daunt us from
our true delight....” In the poem immediately pre-
ceding “Funeral Blues,” Auden refers to “a wicked
secret” and confides that “There is always another
story, there is more than meets the eye.” All these
comments point to the existence of what some peo-
ple might consider an illicit love, that is, one be-
tween two men.
Auden only uses the word “love” once in this
poem, and his tone is simultaneously sarcastic and
despairing: “I thought that love would last for ever:
I was wrong.” The fact that “love” only becomes
visible in a single instance might suggest that this
topic is not of great importance to the poem. How-
ever, this is by far the most grave and deliberate
line in the poem. It is composed of eleven words,
only one of which contains more than one syllable.
The monosyllabic words emphasize and protract
each beat of the line until it arrives at the loud,
deep, and irrevocable sound of “wrong.” When the
poet sees his mistake, when he understands that
eternal love is impossible, he realizes that his calls
in the first two stanzas were insufficient. It is not
enough to stage a public procession of mourning
in a single town on earth; instead, the entire planet
and everything in the universe must come to an end.
Yet, though the poet seems to confirm that
there is no such thing as everlasting love, his ges-
ture to do away with the universe in response to
love’s passing indicates that in fact he equates the
breadth of love with that of the universe. In other
words, the infinitude of the universe makes no
sense if love, too, is not infinite and eternal; thus
if one is destroyed, they both are. Since the poet
does not have the power to close down the uni-
verse, perhaps he is admitting that he may be sim-
ilarly powerless to declare the end of love, regard-Funeral Blues... perhaps he is
acknowledging that love,
with all its anguish and all
its joy, will renew itself
perpetually, and that in the
future the poet will
experience it—and write
about—again and again.”