The poem funeral blues is written by W.H. Auden in 1936 and its main themes are time, death and love. The lyrical I in this poem is a love one left behind, who describes the funeral of a man, the feeling involved and the future ahead.
The poem is metrical since it has 4 stanzas with 4 lines each, the poem has end rhymes in every 2 lines, and the first and third line in every stanza contain the same amount of syllables same goes for the second and fourth line. Throughout the poem there are many alliterations such as scribbling on the sky, my working week, my moon, my midnight, my talk, my song, I thought that love would last, was wrong, for nothing now can ever come, which contributes to the flow of the poem making it easier to read and remember.
The first 3 lines in the third stanza of the poem are extended metaphors for the deceased used to describe how much he meant and how he was everything. Auden makes use of personification where he has the aero planes mourning and scribbling, and he makes use of plenty of symbols, the doves and policemen, to show that the funeral of this man is a big deal. The semantics fields in the last stanza is very universal with sun, moon, stars and ocean, It describe the end of existence, the destruction of the lyrical I’s universe and how nothing will ever be as it was. The first two stanzas and the fourth are filled with verbs which emphasize action, they describe live events whereas the third stanza describes the lyrical I own feelings and is filled with nouns making it more static.
The Essay on Analysis of the Poem “Variations on the Word Love”
The writer of the poem Margaret Atwood was born in November 18, 1939 in Ottawa, Ontario, Canada. She is not only a poet, but also a novelist, a literary critic, an essayist and an environmental activist. And she is an excellent writer, a winner of the Arthur C. Clarke Award and Prince of Asturias award for Literature. Her genres of writing include historical fiction, speculative fiction, science ...
I believe the idea and message of the poem is to show the impact when a love one dies, you feel like the world cannot go on, the lyrical I tries to stop time and communication in the first 2 lines of the poem, but in vain, life goes on, the second stanzas show how people around you will try and show their respect and comfort, but nothing can ever come to any good, the lyrical I thought love would last forever but must now realize that without love there is only nothingness.
The poem shows the abandonment of Victorianism into Modernism it has a much more modern approach, it makes use of plenty of modernistic techniques. We see the Auden experiment with new conceit by comparing the deceased with North, West, East and south, which is typical Modernism. He tries to reflect the complexity of the twentieth century through his lines. What really tells me that this poem is Modernism is how it is written in a stream of consciousness which is very typical Modernism, it is written as if the poet just sat down and wrote his thoughts.
