![]() ![]() ![]() And yet traces of the poem’s original satirical mode remain, such as in that uneasy opening couplet of ‘telephone’ and ‘juicy bone’, and the excessive language used throughout, noted above. It appears that Auden salvaged those two stanzas from the otherwise forgotten play he wrote with Isherwood, and added two new stanzas to them, turning the poem into a more serious expression of grief and lost love. we get, in The Ascent of F6, the rather more tongue-in-cheek couplet, ‘Hold up your umbrellas to keep off the rain / From Doctor Williams while he opens a vein’.) (Instead of ‘He was my North, my South’ etc. Ransom (spoiler alert) is desperate to beat a rival nation to the peak and dies in his hasty attempt to be the first to scale the mountain.Īs Rick Rylance has recently noted in his stimulating and informative book Literature and the Public Good (The Literary Agenda), ‘the poem taken so sincerely to the hearts of many people was, in origin, a p*ss-take.’ But it has nevertheless become a genuine and heartfelt expression of grief to thousands of readers, and a favourite reading at funerals.Īnd it might be more accurate to say that half of the poem began as a parody: the first two stanzas of ‘Funeral Blues’ (or ‘Stop All the Clocks’) appear in The Ascent of F6, but the second half of the poem as we know it was added later. The play is about a climber named Michael Ransom who undertakes a sponsored expedition to the peak of a fictional mountain named F6. It was not personal, but public and not sincere, but, in actual fact, a parody.Ĭuriously, ‘Stop All the Clocks’ began life as a piece of burlesque sending up blues lyrics of the 1930s: Auden originally wrote it for a play he was collaborating on with Christopher Isherwood, The Ascent of F6(1936), which wasn’t entirely serious (although it was billed as a tragedy). Although it is often read and even analysed as a sincere and personal expression of grief, spoken and written by one man about the death of another man – and Auden himself is one of the best-known gay poets of the twentieth century – this was not how the poem was originally conceived. Looking into the origins of ‘Stop All the Clocks’ and placing the poem within this original literary context helps to make sense of these aspects. ![]() Should we, then, respond to these lines as a symptom of the speaker’s hyper-emotional grief for the death of someone who was, as he himself acknowledges, his everything, his north, south, east, and west? Maybe. It suggests that even the natural world seems fake and unreal now that the joys of the world have been taken from him.īut it is also overblown. In that final stanza, too, the word ‘dismantle’ verges on being flippant in the second line, as if the sun is a mechanical device that one can simply take apart, like a watch. That said, sky-writing the news of the person’s death – when sky-writing using aeroplanes was more common for celebrations or for advertising – seems to strike an odd note. Perhaps, then, this is not merely an expression of personal grief, but a poem of mourning for a more public figure? After all, we are used to more rhetoric, and to wholesale public displays of mourning, when a high-profile public figure dies. Even asking the traffic policemen to don black gloves in recognition of the passing of the dead person seems excessive. Is this poem, after all, a sincere expression of personal grief? There is a sense of the melodramatic in many of the (impossible or unreasonable) requests the speaker demands: putting out all of the stars, for instance, or pouring away all the oceans. (After all, who stops all the clocks when someone suffers a personal tragedy, apart from Miss Havisham?)Īnd when we examine the tropes and images of Auden’s poem more closely, it becomes more interesting. ![]() But immediately from those opening words onwards, ‘Stop all the clocks’, there is a suggestion that the poem is going above and beyond – or asking us to go above and beyond – the usual conventions associated with the mourning of a lost loved one. ‘Funeral Blues’ is, then, a poem full of common tropes associated with funerals and mourning. ![]()
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