How can I analyze Funeral Blues by W.H. Auden with reference to stanza, repetition and rhyme?

“Funeral Blues” is commonly viewed as a dirge; a melancholy poem in which the speaker laments the passing of his loved one, ordering the world to recognize his death.

The poem is composed of four stanzas of four lines each, separated into rhyming couplets. This means that the last two words of every two lines rhyme with each other, like the first couplet, where Auden rhymes “telephone” and “bone”. There are no other repeated internal rhymes.

The structural repetition in the poem is noteworthy, though. While Auden doesn’t repeat words (except in the third stanza), stanzas one, two and four follow a similar structural pattern. Each line is a different command to the world to take up some form of mourning (e.g. “Silence the pianos and with muffled drum / Bring out the coffin, let the mourners come.”). This repetition emphasizes the depth of the speaker's mourning.

The third stanza breaks this pattern, causing a crescendo in the piece. (“Funeral Blues” was originally written to music and the third stanza still acts similarly to the musical “bridge” in songwriting.) Instead of following the pattern of the previous two stanzas, the third stanza speaks directly about the person who has died as the speaker says what he meant to him. Within the stanza there’s repetition in the phrasing: “He was my North, my South, my East, my West” and “My noon, my midnight, my talk, my song.”