Volume 10 149
loss back, emphasizing the loss of the speaker. The
funeral messages get smaller, to the fine detail of
the color of the policemen’s gloves. These mes-
sages are more subtle and imply that only those
very close to the deceased would note them. At the
same time, it is interesting that very public figures
(the policemen) wear the symbols. Auden carefully
straddles that line between the public and private
interpretations of grief.
Auden seems then to turn the poem, wanting
the speaker to unequivocally claim this person, de-
tailing his worth and value. The third stanza states:
He was my North, my South, my East and West,
My working week and my Sunday rest,
My noon, my midnight, my talk, my song;
With nine uses of “my” in three lines, the
speaker takes possession of his subject. Auden
wanted to convey that this man was the central el-
ement of the speaker’s life, that no matter the di-
rection he turned, no matter the hour, this man was
there. Auden also notes that the person was the
speaker’s “talk,” his “song.” Talk implies words
and perhaps creations with words, such as poetry.
What Auden is emphasizing here is that along with
everything else, this man was the speaker’s muse,
the source of his artistic creation. These lines again
stress the need to silence everything. Without this
man, the speaker has lost his need to speak. With
the loss of his core, there is nothing to sing about.
Auden then puts this private mourning back
into the public sphere. With everything essential
gone in the speaker’s world, the obvious connec-
tion is to remove all that is essential in the world
at large:
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;
For nothing now can ever come to any good.
The drastic actions suggested in this stanza sig-
nify on a larger scale what has happened in the
speaker’s life. The speaker has already lost his sun,
his moon, his stars. Removing these objects would
no longer have an impact on his life, but others
would then be able to grasp the enormity of his sor-
row.
Although Auden’s elegies seem to express his
personal bereavement at a particular person’s pass-
ing, upon closer readings, one can see how he in-
vites the public to share in the mourning process
and really look at what has been lost with this death.
With his elegies for more public figures like Sig-
mund Freud or W.B. Yeats, it is easier to share in
Auden’s sentiments because of his reader’s famil-
iarity with his subjects. The magic of Auden, how-
ever, is how he is able to invoke his reader’s emo-
tions and have them share and grieve for the loss
of someone who is never even named.
Source:Aviya Kushner, in an essay for Poetry for Students,
Gale, 2001.Sources
Auden, W. H., and Christopher Isherwood,The Ascent of
F6,Faber and Faber, 1936.
———, Another Time,Random House, 1940.
———, Collected Poems,edited by Edward Mendelson,
Vintage, 1991.
———, Collected Shorter Poems: 1927–1957,Random
House, 1966.
Beach, Joseph Warren, The Making of the Auden Canon,
University of Minnesota Press, 1957.
Blair, John G., The Poetic Art of W. H. Auden,Princeton
University Press, 1965.
Carruth, Hayden, review, in The Hudson ReviewVol. 35,
No. 2, Summer, 1982, pp. 334-40.
Eberhart, Richard, review, in Boston Transcript,March 27,
1940, p. 13.
Fenton, James, “Auden at Home,” in The New York Review
of BooksApril, 27, 2000, pp. 8-14.
Fuller, John, W. H. Auden: A Commentary,Princeton Uni-
versity Press, 1998.
Gritten, David, “A Look inside Hollywood and the Movies:
W. H. Auden’s Star Rises with ‘Weddings,’ ” in Los Ange-
les Times,June 26, 1994, p. 25.
Jack, P. M., review, in New York Times,February 18, 1940,
p. 2.
Johnson, Richard, Dictionary of Literary Biography,Vol-
ume 20: British Poets, 1914–1945,Gale, 1983, pp. 19-51.
Kreymborg, Alfred, review, in Living Age,Vol. 358, p. 195.
O’Brien, Sean, “The Auden Regeneration,” in Sunday Times
(London), July 31, 1994.
Sidnell, Michael J., “W. H. Auden,” in Dictionary of Liter-
ary Biography,Volume 10:Modern British Dramatists,
1900–1945,Gale, 1982, pp. 12-24.
Spears, Monroe K., The Poetry of W. H. Auden,Oxford Uni-
versity Press, 1963.
Worsley, T. C., review, in New Statesman and Nation,Vol.
20, July 27, 1940, p. 92.
Wright, George T., “W. H. Auden: Chapter 11: Down
Among the Lost People,” in Twayne’s United States Authors
Series Online,G. K. Hall & Co., 1999.Funeral Blues