Rate A Poem: Funeral Blues

I've read that before, just understood it now as poking fun of the lugubrious after a death. The hyperbole serves to paradoxically amplify the fact that life goes on.

yada yada yada technical speak...

I can't rate this poem, but it's funny, which I always love in anything, and it makes it's point, and i know YOU LOVE IT b/c it's THE BLUES I'm glad you found it.

Anyway, great poem. Thanks for the post, GF.

The overall poem really isn't my cup of tea. It's got some imagery and rhythm that just don't work for me. But...there are some very strong lines that lend themselves well to quotation and they redeem the poem in my eyes and make me understand just why so many people admire it.

I liked this, though the rhythm was off in a couple of place. I'd get rid of some of the extra words, like some of the "the" and others

I especially liked the third stanza

My proposed revisions (take what you like, kill the rest):

Stop all clocks, cut off telephone
Prevent dog from barking with juicy bone
Silence pianos and with muffled drum
Bring out the coffin, let mourners come.

Let aeroplanes circle moaning overhead
Scribbling on the sky "He is Dead"
Put crepe bows on white public doves,
Let traffic policemen wear black cotton gloves.

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;
I thought that love would last forever: I was wrong.

The stars are not wanted; put out every one,
Pack up the moon and dismantle the sun,
Pour away the ocean and sweep up the woods;
For now nothing can ever come to good.

I am by no means a blues affectionado (sp?), for me, the poem is not bluesie enough to be blue.

LOL!

I really have to stop reading stuff while I'm at work! I completely missed that W.H Auden wrote this. It sounded so much like some of your other works, I just assumed it was yours (and didn't read very carefully).

Well it was an interesting exercise for me to revise it. I stand by my suggestions!

crashbam, read your revision:

what's your beef with words like "the", man?!?!


and i don't see the rhythm bein off anywhere in his

Reminds me of another Auden poem I like, Musee des Beaux Art.
Here is a copy of it with the Brueghel painting:
http://www.csupomona.edu/~jelerma/icarus/index.html

This one has such a wail of grief - if you've been there, you can see how true it is.

Well there was this time. . .

Honestly, I don't have a beef with the word "the". It has served me well many times.

Like I said, I did this while at work, in between phone calls, trying to kill some time in a slow day doing something I enjoy. But really my mind was somewhat preoccupied.

When I read it, I was reading it with a critical eye, because I thought I was in the Poetry Critique area and because I thought it was Godfather, whose work I respect, looking for a critique.

I'm in a minimalist mode in my own writing. It's just where I happen to be right now. Suppose it's the influence of the Haiku chain! As a result, I was distracted by the "extra" words.

Obviously this is the work of a great poet. However, for me, I stumbled a bit on some of the rhythm and I found the very last line awkward. It's probably just me.

No offense intended to the word "the" or anyone else!

crashbam said:

No offense intended to the word "the" or anyone else!

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LOL!!!!! The word "the" is quietly playing over on Sesame Street!

I love this poem so much, it's one of my all time favourite pieces!

What's interesting about this particular piece is that it feels clunky if you read it as rythmic, end-stopped rhyme. (the meter is off a little if you're looking for strict adherence to a penta- or sexta(?) meter scheme. It also has an annoying smattering of mono-syllabic feet which create the jarring feel if you are looking for metrical rhythm) Auden was too good for that and displays his mastery in the fact that this ought to be read without consideration for the rhyme. I like this for the same reason I like Neruda's "Saddest Poem". It points directly to the source of his pain without becoming overly abstract. It leaves me with a tangible feel of the depth of pain while using very simple language. Brilliant.

It's always interesting to me to read the different interpretations of a poem... it's so subjective. I didn't find humor in this poem, but instead took the poem more literally. The last stanza is my favorite... something melodic about it to me.
This is not my favorite piece by any means, but I do like it... mostly.

too much angst for me; i have my own, thanks.

This is one of my favorite poems ever! I think its very moving and i can really feel the emotions when i read it, it was originally a song though written from audens "twelve songs" and it was dedicated to his lover chester kallman

I did not see this as a "funny" song, though I can see how it might be.

I like it.

A masterpiece

I love this. Auden was great. And remember in those days homosexuality was illegal and he wouldn't have been able to mourn publicly. So it's not just saying how terrible it is that someone's died- it's saying how his love is just as important as any conventional one.

Even if the meter isn't consistent, the rhythm is - and this poem reads flawlessly to me. That, to me, is more important. The exaggerations, I can see, might be read as derisive, but I don't read them that way. The second stanza, in particular, I read just as an extreme of elegance in expressing despair.

"Put crepe bows round the white necks of the public doves" -- what it means, how it sounds, how it feels to say aloud, all are meticulously appropriate. "The stars are not wanted now; put out every one" -- plain, careful, slow of tempo. To compress this line would be to destroy it.

This, to me, is a marvelous example of how attention to rhythm and word sounds conspire in a great poem, regardless of form or lack thereof.

And if anybody's seen Four Weddings and A Funeral, this is the poem that guy was reading at the funeral.

Unique said:

too much angst for me; i have my own, thanks.

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Haha, with that attitude I think you've cut yourself off from 70% of poetry.

Lady Ice said:

And if anybody's seen Four Weddings and A Funeral, this is the poem that guy was reading at the funeral.

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Yeah - I ALWAYS hear this in John Hannah's voice!

Personally, I love this poem. For me it describes the moment of total despair when you finally, fully grasp that someone is GONE. It's so extreme it's almost self-indulgent. (Then you realise you're being slightly ridiculous, and I think the poem shows that too.)

When I first saw Four Weddings and a Funeral I didn't even realise it was an Auden poem. Which surprised me as I'm a big Auden fan. My anthology (printed 1979) has a hundred of his poems, but Funeral Blues isn't one of them, perhaps indicating Funeral Blues wasn't universally regarded as one of Auden's masterpieces. It's a good poem -- I'm not sure he ever wrote a bad one in his life -- but there are several phrases

juicy bone
Bring out the coffin, let the mourners come
my North, my South, my East and West
For nothing now can ever come to any good

which don't strike me as being his best. And this one

Put crepe bows round the white necks of the public doves

is a horror show. It's also rather overwrought. By Auden's standards, it's average at best.

Yes - I imagine that line serves its intent - with repeated emphasised syllables, it slows the reader's pace to a plod. And, yes, it's overdramatic in every detail, as is much of the poem. I presume that "overwrought" is precisely what the poet hopes we'll see there.

Could be that I'm reading too much into meter, and I'm a little lenient on the cliches because I'm reading this poem a long, long time after it was written. But, as I see it, qualitative critical analysis is kind of a parlor game in itself.

A few sources on the net suggest this poem is a parody of mourning for a public figure in a play called The Ascent of F6. That would explain some of Auden's language in the poem. I did wonder if he was having a laugh.