Saturday, May 21, 2011

In "Funeral Blues" by W.H. Auden, what does 'he' (the person being talked about) mean to the narrator?

In this poem, “he” has passed away, and the narrator says of him:



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.



This person obviously meant the world to the speaker; every direction the speaker looked, every day, every hour, was consumed by 'him,' was given to him by the speaker.  And now the speaker is despairing, quite understandably.  In the final verse, he or she bids the stars be snuffed out, bids the sun and the moon to stop shining, because these bodies invite life and happiness, two things that the speaker believes cannot exist without this person.  The speaker desires that the entire world go into mourning for this person, down to traffic officers and “the public doves.”  He was obviously of tremendous importance to the narrator.


It should be noted that the first version of this poem, published in 1936, was written as a satirical response to the death of a political leader in the play The Ascent of F6.  The first two verses of the second, widely published version are drawn from this first draft.  And these first two stanzas certainly do have a thin air of sarcasm about them; the last two verses, however, are far more sentimental and seem to have been written in earnest.  Thus we can assume that the speakers feelings of loss and depression are very real, even though his or her responses to this death are at some points a bit dramatic.

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