148 Poetry for Students
less of his sorrow. Or perhaps he is acknowledg-
ing 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.
In some of the other “Twelve Poems” Auden
addresses homosexual love, and in “Funeral Blues”
the poet specifically identifies the deceased as
male. Nevertheless, there is a universalizing ges-
ture in this poem, as its voice changes several times.
When it appeared in The Ascent of F6,“Funeral
Blues” was to be sung by two people, one man and
one woman. In Another Time,the “song” has a fe-
male singer, Hedli Anderson. In Collected Poems,
Auden does not identify a particular speaker, fur-
ther underscoring the flexibility of the poem. What
literary critic James Fenton says of the fourth lyric
in “Twelve Songs” is equally true of the ninth: “any
reader can be the lover, the speaker of this poem,”
and the critic remarks that “there is generosity in
this” (“Auden at Home”). What Fenton means is
that Auden allows readers to use the poet’s per-
sonal experience and apply it to their own lives, re-
gardless of the gender of the reader or of the
reader’s beloved. In this Fenton substantiates what
Auden’s poem makes clear: that love, like poetry,
is not only exceptionally resilient but also benevo-
lently versatile.
Source:Jeannine Johnson, in an essay for Poetry for Stu-
dents,Gale, 2001.Aviya Kushner
Aviya Kushner, who is the poetry editor for
New World Renaissance Magazine, earned an
M.A. in creative writing from Boston University. In
the following essay, Ms. Kushner discusses Auden’s
perspective on personal and public grief and how
he parallels the two in his poem Funeral Blues.During Auden’s lifetime, Auden witnessed
both World Wars and the deaths of many impor-
tant public figures. Auden found himself writing
many elegies, memorializing and capturing the im-
pact these figures had on the public and their cen-
tury. Auden’s “In Memory of Sigmund Freud” re-
marks on the difficulty of writing an elegy when
there are so many to mourn:
When there are so many we shall have to mourn,
when grief has been made so public, and exposed
to the critique of a whole epoch
the frailty of our conscience and anguish,of whom shall we speak?
Thus, the poet’s challenge, even when writing
about a famous man, is to write something that dis-
tinguishes his subject from all the others who have
recently died.
Here, in “Funeral Blues,” Auden, through the
voice of the speaker, seems to be writing an elegy
for someone who meant a great deal to him per-
sonally. Although Auden does not clearly state
about whom the poem is written, one can gather
that speaker loved this person dearly. However, it
is not clear that this is a conventional elegy: Au-
den may simply be mourning the end of a rela-
tionship, not a death. In either reading, Auden is
wrestling with the realization that love does not al-
ways last. Auden uses some of his favorite images
here to stress the fragility of love: clocks, midnight,
ocean. With the “death” of this person in the
speaker’s world, time has stopped, and there is no
reason for communication. All that is warranted
now is quiet, to “silence the pianos,” “cut off the
telephone.”
Although Auden wants this world to come to
a halt, the death must be announced, as the next
stanza details:
Let aeroplanes circle moaning overhead
Scribbling on the sky the message: He is Dead.
Put crepe bows round the white necks of the public
doves
Let the traffic policemen wear black cotton gloves.
This stanza is about opening up this private
grief for a public mourning. These images insist
that everyone share in this person’s loss because
not only has the speaker lost someone very special,
essentially, so has the world. Still, Auden is keep-
ing a tight control on this stanza and about how this
loss will be shared. The first line invoking the aero-
planes is a bold image. With the planes “moaning”
overhead and the message being “scribbled” in the
sky, large numbers of people are sure to note their
significance. But then Auden seems to bring theFuneral BluesThe magic of Auden
... is how he is able to
invoke his reader’s emotions
and have them share and
grieve for the loss of
someone who is never even
named.”