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It featured in the romantic comedy movie ‘Four Weddings and a Funeral’, an appropriate choice as Auden was gay and the fictional funeral in the film was for a gay man. The poem comprises four...
Mar 19, 2009 · Poem from "Four Weddings and a Funeral" Lyrics & Recording. There's a beautiful poem by W H Auden from the film "Four Weddings and a Funeral" called "Funeral Blues" and read by John Hannah. It's amazingly powerful.
- Funeral Blues (Stop All The Clocks) by WH Auden
- Analysis of Funeral Blues
- Figures of Speech and More: Funeral Blues
- What Is A Stanza?
- A Brief History of Funeral Blues
- Download A Printable Pdf of Funeral Blues
- Additional Resources
Stopall the clocks, cut off the telephone, Prevent the dog frombarking with a juicy bone, Silence the pianos and with muffleddrum Bring out the coffin, let the mourners come. Letaeroplanes circle moaning overhead Scribbling on the sky themessage He Is Dead. Put crepe bows round the white necks of publicdoves, Let the traffic policemen wear black co...
'Funeral Blues', or 'Stop All the Clocks', is an *elegy. It has four, four-line *stanzas which use rhyming couplets. The poem makes its point through the extensive use of *hyperbole. The word 'Blues' in the title links the poem to the blues musical genre and to the expression 'to have the blues'. Blues music grew out ofthe suffering caused by slave...
Knowing a little about how and why a poem works can be helpful toward deepening your understanding and appreciation of it. To that end I've made a few brief notes about the type of poem Funeral Blues is, its structure (how its content/lines are organized) and the principal figures of speech it uses.
*A stanza is the name given to a group of lines in a poem. On a printed page or screen, they are visually separated from other lines by a double space or an indentation. A stanza in a poem is the equivalent of a paragraph in an essay or an article. The word 'verse' and 'stanza' are often used interchangeably. However, there are differences between ...
Several years after it was written the tone and purpose of 'Funeral Blues' morphed remarkably: undergoing a complete transformation. An initial version of the poem originally appeared in a 1936 play: 'The Ascent of F6' which WH Auden co-wrote with playwright Christopher Isherwood for an experimental theatre company they both belonged to, called The...
Click the image below to download a printable pdf of Funeral Blues for your own use. (Please note the link for the pdf will open in a new window.) Return to Top
The poem is read in its entirety in the 1994 British romantic comedy film Four Weddings and a Funeral. The poem is read by Matthew, a character portrayed by John Hannah , at the funeral of his partner Gareth. [2]
It was meant to be a satiric piece lamenting the loss of a political figure appearing in the play. From then onwards, the text underwent several changes to become a four-stanza poem comprising four lines each. The text is referenced often in film and TV, such as in Four Weddings and a Funeral (1994) and Gavin and Stacey (2007). Auden rewrote ...
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'What is the poem in FOUR WEDDINGS AND A FUNERAL? - "The poem is by W. H. Auden. Like many of his other works, it is known by its first line, "Stop All the Clocks".
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.
