First the poem,
W.H. Auden’s
Funeral Blues:
Stop all the clocks, cut off the telephone,
Prevent the dog from barking with a juicy bone,
Silence the pianos and with muffled drum
Bring out the coffin, let the mourners come.
Let aeroplanes circle moaning overhead
Scribbling on the sky the message ‘He is Dead’.
Put crepe bows round the white necks of the public doves,
Let the 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 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 poem now seems clear to me.
1. Genial mockery vis hyperbole of public expressions of grief.
2. Genial mockery of personal expressions of grief.
3. Last line of three: Gentle fun of greeting card style in his expression of loss.
4. First three lines of four: Similar to three
5. Last line: similar to last line of three.
Very symmetrical, thus also very simple in form.
P:
like your paradoxical image; it's like the notion of extreme vitality employed to announce the termination of what was once so vital.
The poem resembles coition, with building and all rising exuberance, then risidual emptiness. There is a rhythm rise and fall- even an abrupt collapse.
In the first stanza there are commands to withdraw from the quotidian-followed in the second by permissiveness- the intimacy of erotic sound and gesture -then abandonment in the third -heady ecstacy plus intensity of love, in all directions and none-and in the final stanza deflation-energy and substance voided. .
It builds up through luxuriant hyperbole to the sudden pouring away of the ocean, then stalls at the remaining emotional void.
Sort of.
M: replying to P
Couldn't have put it better myself!
But the third stanza makes me want to pose a question: if it can be conceded that a poem may be 'about' something, is it a fair reading to say that "Funeral Blues" is about the end of a love affair or relationship rather than bereavement in the usual sense?
P: back to M
Yeah, I once figured that and forgot... Emphasis then is on 'Blues' in title...
Me:
Thank you P for your nice reading and M for your comment and good question.
Not sure I agree with your reading P.
I’m not seeing the rhythm of sex here, though it may well
be there and I’m just not seeing it.
I get the playfulness, exuberance and outlandishness of the surreal images and demands of the first two stanzas. I just don’t get their “why” given what I would assume to be the speaker’s grief. And some of them are or verge on the absurd: traffic cops wearing black gloves: crepe bows around the necks of white doves; give the dog a juicy bone to silence its barking; skywrite ‘He is dead.’ These images remind me of Salvador Dali paintings. But why this spiritedness in the face of such loss? It sounds celebratory, publicly ceremonial. I infer, assume, it’s not a public occasion, the death of some revered public figure who has lived a full life. It’s rather the death of an intimate, a lover who constituted virtually the whole of the speaker’s life. The exuberance, the playfulness, the outlandishness tend to baffle me.
Even the poem’s title, Funeral Blues, has me wondering. It seems to go to a step removed. I think of the blues as a sad or depressed state of mind brought on by a calamitous event: a flood, a death, a lover’s wrongdoing and so on ad infinitum. Song titles for these events might be high water blues or death letter blues or my rider’s gone blues. But here it’s not the death as such generating the blues. It’s the secondary event, the funeral, which in principle is a ritual to commemorate a past life and to try to accommodate grief.
My working theory is that the in the outlandishness of the first two stanzas,and the oddity of the funeral generating the blues rather than the death as such, there’s some genial subversion, a lampooning, a sending up, of public signification of the death as opposed to the intensity of the private grief.
So then in the third stanza, the genially subversive lampoon gives way to the expression of how all consuming and life defining this love was, such that in its absorption and intensity was born the illusion it would never end, kind of like in Donne’s poems where the lovers’ bed becomes the centre of and entirety of the world. Last line of third stanza is a coming to terms with the illusion. Death is a fatal dominant X.
And the final stanza is of weeping despair. Now, no surreal, playful directives. Now, the opposite: pack up, dismantle, pour out, sweep away all the substance of the world (and the material for images, metaphors and symbols of art expressing love). “For nothing now can ever come to any good.”
M, as to your nice question, in my view it’s entirely plausible to read the poem as about the end of a love affair. I don’t read it that way but it’s certainly defensible and casts a much different light on the poem, especially on the first two stanzas.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment