What is W.H. Auden trying to say in Funeral Blues?
The poem, commonly known by its opening words, “Stop all the clocks,” exists in two very different versions: the original version in five stanzas, and the version in four stanzas from 1938 that became famous when it was recited in the film Four Weddings and a Funeral. The original five-stanza version was a parody of a poem of mourning for a political leader written for the verse play The Ascent of F6, which Auden wrote with Christopher Isherwood in 1936. Both the original and the version share the first and second stanzas, but the endings are entirely different. The final four-stanza version of the poem was written to be sung by the soprano Hedli Anderson, in a setting by Benjamin Britten. In this form, Auden contributed it to an anthology The Year’s Poetry, 1938, compiled by Denys Kilham Roberts and Geoffrey Grigson (London, 1938), and included it in his book Another Time as one of four poems headed “Four Cabaret Songs for Miss Hedli Anderson”; the poem itself was titled “Funeral Blue
