Poem of the Week: ‘Funeral Blues’ by W. H. Auden
2 September 2024
Our Poem of the Week is ‘Funeral Blues’, also known as ‘Stop All the Clocks’ by W. H. Auden, which appears in Another Time, the first volume that Auden published after his departure to America with Christopher Isherwood in January 1939.
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 crêpe 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 for ever: I was wrong.
Stop All the Clocks: Poems of Love and Loss by W. H. Auden is published on 20 November 2025.
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Poetry to reach for in times of turmoil.
About the Author
W. H. Auden was born in York in 1907 and brought up in Birmingham. His first book, Poems, was published by T. S. Eliot at Faber in 1930. He went to Spain during the civil war, to Iceland (with Louis MacNeice) and later travelled to China. In 1939 he and Christopher Isherwood left for America, where Auden spent the next fifteen years lecturing, reviewing, writing poetry and opera librettos, and editing anthologies.
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Faber 90th Anniversary edition of this loved and admired collection of poems