'Funeral Blues' (W.H. Auden) Flashcards
subject terminology
futility, nihilism, melancholic, bereaved, mourning
Main ideas
1)Death is permanent and inevitable and there’s nothing you can do about it.
2) Even If someone is mourning the death of a loved one, normal life still goes on around them.
3) most important person in the world is gone
What methods are used to convey his points?
imperatives, rhyming couplets (elegy), religious imagery, semantic field, personification
3 examples of imperatives
1)’Stop all the clocks, cut off all the telephones’
2) ‘Prevent the dog from barking with a juicy bone’
3) ‘Silence the pianos and with the muffled drum’
example of religious imagery
‘He is Dead’
4 examples of him saying everything is lost and life is pointless (nihilism) now that this person is dead
1) ‘He was my North, my South, my East and West’
2) ‘My working week and my Sunday rest’
3) ‘I thought that love would last forever: I was wrong
4) ‘For nothing now can ever come to any good’
How does religious imagery help prove his point?
He sees his loved one as the most important person as ‘He’ has a capital letter, which is often used to refer to God, who is worshipped all over the world and that’s how Auden sees this person.
How do imperatives help prove his point?
If someone special to you has died, there will still be people who are enjoying their lives like nothing happened and he wants everyone to appreciate his bereavement of the loss of his friend.
How do rhyming couplets help prove his point?
Rhyming couplets are used in elegies which are typically very sad poems about death.
How does personification help prove his point?
The death of his lover was such a huge and tragic loss that even inanimate objects are mourning his death.
Quotation using personification.
‘Let the aeroplanes circle moaning overhead Scribbling on the sky the message He is Dead’ (as if everyone should know him
