“Funeral Blues” was written by the British poet W. H. Auden and first published in 1938. It's a poem about the immensity of grief: the speaker has lost someone important, but the rest of the world doesn’t slow down or stop to pay its respects—it just keeps plugging along on as if nothing has changed. The speaker experiences this indifference as a kind of rude torment, and demands that the world grieve too. Grief, in the poem, is thus presented as something deeply isolating, an emotion that cuts off the people who grieve from the world around them.
Turn off the clocks and cut the telephone cords. Give the dog a juicy bone so it stops barking. Make the pianos stop playing and then bring out the coffin and the mourners, accompanied only by a quiet drum.
Let airplanes fly sadly over us and write “He is Dead” in the sky. Put black bows around the white necks of the pigeons in the street. Make the traffic cops wear black gloves.
He was everything to me: all the points of the compass. He was my work week and my day off. He was every hour of my day, present in everything I spoke or sang. I thought our love would never end. That wasn't true.
I don’t want to see the stars anymore: put out their lights. Take the moon out of the sky and take the sun apart. Pour the ocean down the drain and sweep the forest away. Nothing good can ever happen again.
“Funeral Blues” is a poem about heartbreak and grief—specifically, about the way that these feelings make people feel isolated from and out of sync with the world around them. It’s possible to interpret the loss at the heart of the poem in several ways—the speaker could be grieving the end of a romantic relationship or the death of a loved one. But regardless of why the speaker grieves, the poem insists that the world doesn’t stop to grieve with the speaker: the stars keep shining, the clocks keep ticking, and the dogs keep barking, much to the speaker’s frustration. The world’s indifference highlights the intensely personal and isolating nature of grief. Grief, the poem argues, can make it feel like your entire life has come undone—even if the rest of the world doesn’t seem to notice that anything has changed.
The speaker of “Funeral Blues” has clearly lost someone important. The poem's title suggests that someone has literally died, and the speaker also asks for “coffin” and “mourners.” The speaker even demands that “aeroplanes … scribbl[e] on the sky the message ‘He is Dead.’” Of course, this could also all be metaphorical; the speaker could be going through a major breakup and using death as a way to talk about these feelings of heartbreak and loss. The exact cause of this grief isn’t really what’s important here, though. Instead, the poem focuses on the fact that, even as that this grief seems totally overwhelming to the speaker, it’s not even a blip on the radar of the rest of the world.
The fact that the world keeps chugging along feels like an affront to the speaker, because it seems to belittle the speaker’s grief and to disrespect the memory of what the speaker lost. How, the poem implicitly asks, can everyone else go on when this earth-shattering event has taken place?
The speaker thus makes a series of grandiose, even hyperbolic, requests: the speaker wants to stop the clocks. The speaker wants a public funeral, with pigeons wearing black bows around their necks. The speaker wants the sun, moon, and stars to all stop shining. The speaker wants the whole world to shut down and grieve.
Over the top as they are, these demands reveal to the reader that the speaker doesn’t want to grieve alone. The speaker wants the rest of the world to acknowledge and reflect the magnitude of the speaker’s loss. The poem thus suggests that, whether you've lost a loved one or had your heartbroken, part of what makes grief so terrible, so hard to endure, is the isolation it creates. Grief causes a painful separation between the world—indifferent, unconcerned—and the person who grieves. More broadly, the poem also speaks to the overwhelming, all-encompassing nature of grief—which can make it feel like the world itself has ended, and that “nothing now can ever come to any good.”
Stop all the ...
... the mourners come.
The poem begins with the speaker making a series of urgent requests. The speaker wants to stop “the clocks,” to turn off the “telephone”, to give the dog a “juicy bone” to keep it from barking, and to “silence the pianos.” Many of these requests are symbolic. For instance, when the speaker asks to “stop all the clocks,” the speaker is really asking to stop time itself. The telephone, meanwhile, might represent modern life and business: the speaker isn’t asking to “cut off” a specific telephone, but all telephones, and with them their constant stream of interruptions and information. Finally, the “pianos” symbolize raucous parties and celebration. Overall, then, the speaker is asking for a moment of peace and stillness, free from distracting noises, a moment of somber reflection.
In lines 3-4, it becomes clear why the speaker wants this: someone important to the speaker has died. (It's possible to read this as a literal death, or as a metaphor for the end of an important relationship.) The speaker is asking the rest of the world to mourn with the speaker, to acknowledge the magnitude of this loss. But the fact that the speaker has to ask for the clocks to stop and the telephones to be cut suggest that the world hasn’t stopped to accommodate the speaker’s grief. In other words, there’s a disconnect between the world and the speaker. The speaker is heartbroken, and the world seems indifferent to the speaker’s grief: it keeps moving along, business as usual. As such, the speaker feels isolated and demands that the world slow down, stop, bring itself in line with the speaker's grief.
The first four lines also establish the poem’s form. The poem is written in quatrains: it has four stanzas, each with four lines. Each quatrain is composed of two rhyming couplets (creating an AABB rhyme scheme). The poem uses meter, but its meter shifts around unpredictably: lines 1, 3, and 4 are in iambic pentameter, while line 2 is probably best thought of as being in iambic hexameter. Recall that an iamb is a poetic unit with a da DUM stress pattern; pentameter has five iambs per line, while hexameter has six.
There are also lots of metrical substitutions throughout. The first line, for instance, opens with a spondee (stressed-stressed) or a trochee (stressed-unstressed), depending on how it's read; either way, this adds extra emphasis to the speaker's request:
Stop all | the clocks, | cut off | the tel- | ephone
Prevent | the dog | from bark- | ing with | a jui- | cy bone,
Silence the | pia- | nos and | with muf- | fled drum
Bring out | the cof- | fin, let | the mourn- | ers come.
As is clear above, the meter definitely isn't regular. Line 3, for instance, actually opens with a dactyl (stressed-unstressed-unstressed). Altogether, these shifts in the meter add a sense of instability to the poem's rhythm.
The poem almost exclusively uses end-stopped lines. This creates a sense that each line is cut off from the next, a sense which is strengthened by the caesuras that divide lines 1 and 4. Overall, the poem’s sentences and phrases tend to be discrete. The speaker doesn’t use coordinating words like “and” or “therefore” to show the reader how each is related to the next. Instead, the reader has to figure out for themselves how everything fits together. This is an example of the poetic device asyndeton—a device the speaker uses throughout the poem. Without such clues about how the speaker’s ideas and requests are related to each other, the poem feels spontaneous and unplanned—an overflowing of grief that expresses itself in a turbulent, sometimes disorganized flow of thoughts.
The speaker does give some hints that the reader should try to assemble these discrete ideas. For example, the speaker uses an alliterative /k/ sound in lines 1 and 4, in words like “clock,” “cut,” “coffin,” and “come.” Bracketing the stanza, these alliterations suggest an underlying continuity that runs through the speaker’s grief. And, at times, the speaker breaks the poem’s pattern, slipping in an enjambment—as line 3. This enjambment falls at a crucial point in the poem: the first time the speaker admits that someone has (metaphorically or literally) died. The idea is so upsetting for the speaker that it causes the poem to skid a little, to lose its confidence.
Let aeroplanes circle ...
... black cotton gloves.
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Get LitCharts A+He was my ...
... I was wrong.
The stars are ...
... to any good.
Clocks not only measure time: they’re also symbols for time. So, when the speaker says in the poem’s first line to “stop all the clocks,” what the speaker is really asking for is to stop time itself. The speaker doesn’t want the world to keep going, to keep rushing forward: instead, the speaker wants the world to pause and reflect, to absorb the loss that the speaker is mourning.
The reader can interpret the “clocks” as metonyms for time in general, but there's also a more specific symbolic resonance. They appear next to the “telephone” which can be read as a symbol of business and commerce. The “clocks” might be meant in roughly the same way: the speaker wants to slow down the hectic pace of business or of modern life in general—where everyone’s on the clock, on a deadline—and carve out time for reflection and mourning. In either case, the speaker’s goal is to find a way to slow things down—to make the world take a pause and mourn.
At the time “Funeral Blues” was written, telephones were new-fangled inventions. For the speaker of the poem, they likely symbolize the modern world itself—its innovations, its speed, and the sudden ease with which people could communicate with each other.
More specifically, since early telephones were largely used in businesses, the telephone might be taken to symbolize business and commerce. The speaker wants that fast paced world to pause, to grant the speaker space and silence to mourn. In order to so, the speaker must first “cut off the telephone”: shut off its constant stream of information and communication. The telephone is thus a symbol of everything that the speaker wants to slow down and shut up—and a painful reminder of the way that the world keeps humming along, despite the speaker's loss.
“Pianos” are symbols for joy and celebration. At the time “Funeral Blues” was written, pianos were widely used in raucous, celebratory music. Of course, they were used in mournful music too, but the speaker ignores that here. Instead, the speaker draws a contrast between the bright, cheerful tinkling of a piano and the “muffled drum,” a sad, quiet instrument appropriate to the speaker’s mournful mood. The speaker finds the piano and its loud, joyful music inappropriate: the speaker wants music that matches that grief and heartbreak that the speaker feels. Thus when the speaker asks the world to “silence the pianos,” the speaker is really asking the world to stop all its celebrations and parties, to join the speaker in mourning.
“Doves” are symbols of peace. Doves are actually the same species as pigeons, a fact that the speaker nods to by calling the birds “public”—in other words, just like pigeons, these “public doves” live on the streets and in buildings, scavenging for food. Invoking “doves” here, the speaker suggests how deep this grief is. The speaker doesn’t just want people to stop going to parties and talking on the telephone: the speaker even wants symbols of peace and understanding to cease their usual activities and join with the speaker in mourning. Everything must reflect the speaker's grief.
“Stars” are symbols of hope and guidance. For instance, sailors used stars to navigate: they helped them figure out where they were on the sea and where to go. Stars are also bright and beautiful, often used to represent the things that people dream about, the goals they set for themselves and hope to attain. The speaker rejects this hope, this guidance, in line 13, saying, “The stars are not wanted now.” In other words, the speaker has totally given up and doesn’t seek a way out of all this despair. Instead, the speaker wants to wallow in grief.
The speaker references black clothing twice in the poem: first in line 7 with the "crepe bows" to be tied "round the white necks of public doves," and then with the policemen's "black cotton gloves" in line 8. In both instances, this black clothing represents the speaker's desire for public despair and mourning. This isn't a particularly surprising symbol, since the color black has long been associated with mourning. The speaker wants the world to physically reflect how the speaker feels—to wear its mourning on its sleeve (well, its neck and hands!).
“Funeral Blues” is a strongly end-stopped poem: in fact, it only uses enjambment twice, in lines 3 and 5. Otherwise, every line in the poem is end-stopped. These end-stops tend to cut off one line from the next: each line has a discrete idea or request and the next line introduces a new idea, a new demand. Take lines 7-8:
Put crepe bows round the white necks of the public doves,
Let the traffic policemen wear black cotton gloves.
In line 7, the speaker wants “public doves”—in other words, pigeons—to wear black ribbons as a show of respect for the speaker's loss. In line 8, the speaker asks “traffic policemen” to “wear black cotton gloves”—another sign of respect. The two lines are obviously related: they make fairly similar requests, though they are addressed to very different groups, pigeons and policemen.
Otherwise, though, the lines are disconnected, even disjointed—a pattern that holds for the rest of the poem. They don’t build on each other in a logical way: readers could reverse the order of these lines without changing the energy or the meaning of the poem. The end-stops help to create this disjointed, disconnected feeling—as though the speaker is simply listing demands and requests as they occur to the speaker, without much forethought or planning. The poem’s end-stops are thus definitive, sharp, and isolating—they cut one line of the poem off from the lines around it. In this way, the subtly echo the speaker’s point: that grief is isolating, that it cuts off the person who grieves from the world around them.
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Muted, hard to hear. The speaker wants the drummers to play quietly out of respect for the speaker's loss.
“Funeral Blues” is best thought of as an elegy, given that it's meant to memorialize someone who has died (or perhaps just disappeared from the speaker's life).
It has 16 lines, divided into four four-line stanzas, or quatrains. Each stanza is almost something called an elegaic stanza; these are stanzas with four lines in iambic pentameter with an alternating ABAB rhyme scheme. Except, this poem is actually written in rhyming couplets (AABB). And since these couplets are, broadly speaking, in iambic pentameter, they can specifically be thought of as something called "heroic couplets." As the name would suggest, this makes the poem feel lofty and literary; its form elevates the intensity of the speaker's grief.
Overall, the poem's steady couplets and stanza lengths suggest a relatively predictable musical pattern. The poem feels tidy on the surface—though, as we'll talk about more in this guide's discussion of meter, things aren't actually are smooth as they first appear.
Broadly speaking, “Funeral Blues” can be thought of as using iambic pentameter. There are lots of variations throughout, though, and sometimes the poem relies on iambic hexameter instead. Recall that an iamb is a poetic foot that follows an unstressed-stressed syllable pattern. Iambic pentameter has five feet per line, while iambic pentameter has six feet. This means many lines feel like they have extra poetic feet dangling off the ends.
As a result, the poem’s da DUM rhythm feels consistent, but its lines keep changing length. In a strongly rhymed poem, this might makes things sound a little wonky or syncopated because the poem’s rhymes don’t always fall where readers expect them to. Readers can hear the poem’s rhythm—and the discomfort its shift line lengths cause—in the first two lines:
Stop all | the clocks, | cut off | the tel- | ephone
Prevent | the dog | from bark | ing with | a juic- | y bone
“Telephone” and “bone” rhyme. But line 2 is two syllables longer than line 1. So the reader has to wait just a moment to get to the rhyme. In this way, the poem creates tension between the reader’s expectations and its rhythm, generating delay, syncopation, even awkwardness.
This effect is admittedly pretty subtle. But the sensation that this poem isn't all that simple and smooth is bolstered by the fact that the poem's iambic meter itself is unsteady. Many of the poem's lines—including line 1 quoted above—begin with stressed syllables rather than the initial unstressed syllable that characterizes an iamb. This creates either trochees (stressed-unstressed) or spondees (stressed-stressed). In both instances, these initial stresses open many lines on a powerful, assertive note—and, as such, emphasize the intensity of the speaker's grief. The speaker isn't gently requesting that the world grieve; the speaker is forcefully demanding that it do so.
There are other metrical substitutions and hiccups throughout the poem. Take a look at line 10, for example:
My work- | ing week | and my | Sunday | rest,
The line starts out iambic, but the last couple feet don't quite fit: "and my" arguably has no stress at all (making it a pyrrhic), "Sunday" is another trochee, and then there's a single stressed syllable at the end of the line. All these variations and shifts give the reader the sense that the speaker is struggling—and failing—to control the poem. The speaker’s "blues" is marked by the grief that the speaker, an emotion so powerful and overwhelming that it upsets the poem’s meter.
“Funeral Blues” is written in rhyming couplets. The poem’s rhyme scheme is therefore:
AABB
Because the poem is, very broadly speaking, written in iambic pentameter, these couplets can be even more specifically described as being "heroic couplets." There's also a new set of rhymes in each quatrain, and these are all strong, perfect rhymes. The poem's rhyme words—like “drum” and “come” in lines 3-4 and “doves” and “gloves” in lines 7-8—line up nicely, giving the poem a sense of steady music, which is important for a poem that calls itself a "blues"! In short, the poem’s rhyme scheme helps "Funeral Blues" really feel like a song, a mournful dirge for a lost love.
The speaker of “Funeral Blues” is a person who has recently lost someone important and is currently in mourning. Perhaps this speaker is being a bit melodramatic, what with hyperbolic phrases like "nothing now can ever come to any good." Then again, that's often how grief and heartbreak can make things feel—like you'll never be happy or even just okay again.
It’s not clear from the poem what happened—maybe someone has died or a relationship has simply ended. The poem doesn’t specify, and, in a way, it doesn’t matter: the poem isn’t focused on a specific kind of grief or heartbreak. Instead, it’s about the way that grief and heartbreak, whatever their source, can be overwhelming and isolating. As a result, the reader never gets many specifics about the speaker either. The reader never learns the speaker's age, gender, profession, or nationality. The poem describes something universal—grief—and it uses a more or less universal speaker to do so: there’s no specific attachments that might get in the way of fully empathizing with and sharing in the speaker’s grief.
“Funeral Blues” doesn't have a specific setting. This might seem surprising, given that the poem lists so many specific things (“clocks,” “aeroplanes,” “doves,” “traffic policemen,” etc.). But at best, the reader can infer that the poem is set in a city, since there are “traffic policemen” around. The speaker uses details, but handles those details in a very generic, non-specific way. For instance, when the speaker asks in line 1 for “the telephone” to be “cut off,” the speaker isn’t referring to a specific telephone in a specific place. Instead, the speaker is calling for all telephones to be “cut off.”
The poem resists putting itself in a specific place for a good reason. It’s describing a universal experience: the sense of isolation from the world that follows a serious loss. And in the absence of a specific setting, the poem feels universal—like it could describe anyone’s experience, in any place and any time.
In its current form, “Funeral Blues” was first published in a 1938 anthology. Since then, it’s become one of the classic poems of grief and heartbreak—something that people turn to in a variety of contexts (it even appeared in a Hugh Grant movie from the 1990s!). The early drafts of the poem were written for the play The Ascent of F6, which Auden co-wrote with the writer Christopher Isherwood in 1936. The play makes fun of British imperialism, and the poem appears in a satirical context.
Isherwood and Auden were frequent collaborators. They were part of an early wave of 20th-century gay writers (and, in fact, were some of the first openly gay writers). Both were firmly on the political left as well, criticizing not only their own country’s imperial escapades but, in poems like “September 1, 1939,” criticizing the rise of fascism in Europe.
Auden is considered one of the masters of English-language poetry. He was a modernist who helped to define that early 20th-century movement, with its groundbreaking formal and stylistic experimentation. At the same time, he is highly regarded for his facility with traditional verse forms. The wit, craftsmanship, and restless variety of his work gained him wide acclaim as both a poet and critic.
“Funeral Blues” was written in the late 1930s, which was a difficult time for a number of reasons. The world was in the middle of a serious economic downturn, which economists now call the Great Depression. Millions of people around the globe were struggling to find work and feed their families. Meanwhile, oppressive fascist governments had taken power in Germany, Italy, and Spain, and there was a significant fascist movement in Auden’s home country of England. Large parts of the globe, including significant portions of Africa and Asia, were ruled by European countries via a system called “imperialism." Imperialism stripped these people of their capacity to rule themselves, to control their own lives—and it often involved brutal suppression of civil liberties and human rights.
When the poem was first written, it engaged directly with this historical context: it was part of a play Auden co-wrote with Christopher Isherwood called The Ascent of F6—a play that satirized British imperialism. However, Auden subsequently published the poem on its own, stripping it of its immediate political engagements, and transforming it into a universal statement of grief and heartbreak. The poem thus can be read in relation to its own moment: the economic and political insecurity of the late 1930s. But it can also be read without reference to any particular historical context. Indeed, it's a poem that invites its reader to identify with it, to bring it into their own lives and historical moments.
The "Blues" Aloud — Tom O'Bedlam reads the poem out loud.
An Introduction to "Funeral Blues" — A detailed history of the poem from the British Library.
Funeral Blues — Benjamin Britten's musical setting of "Funeral Blues."
W. H. Auden's Biography — A detailed biography of W. H. Auden from the Poetry Foundation.
"Four Weddings and a Funeral" — A scene from the classic 1994 film in which a character recites "Funeral Blues" at his partner's funeral. The film helped secure the poem's place in modern pop culture.