The speaker of “Funeral Blues” is an anonymous figure, so we don’t know much about that person. For example, we don’t know the speaker’s age, gender, class, or racial identity. But we do know that this person has experienced a devastating personal loss and is processing grief. It isn’t clear what relationship the speaker had with the man who died, but this man played a significant role in the speaker’s life. This is clearly indicated in the third stanza. He meant the world to the speaker: “He was my North, my South, my East and West” (line 9). As such, the man’s death has overwhelmed the speaker emotionally and distorted his or her outlook on life. Auden echoes this distortion on a formal level, and particularly in the contrast between the irregular meter and the regular rhyme. These formal features give the poem a feeling of instability that mirrors the speaker’s sense of destabilization.

Perhaps even more devastating is how grief leaves the speaker feeling isolated. The speaker doesn’t describe isolation explicitly. However, the language of the opening stanza does subtly communicate the speaker’s sense of being alone with that grief (lines 1–4):

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.

First, note how the speaker speaks solely in commands. Who, exactly, is the speaker commanding? In a sense, the speaker is issuing these commands to the world at large, which goes on as though nothing has happened. Clocks keep ticking, the phone keeps ringing, dogs keep barking, and music keeps playing. In other words, the world doesn’t register the speaker’s loss. Alone in his or her grief, then, the speaker commands the world to stop and come alongside to mourn. The speaker continues in this mode in the second stanza, issuing more commands for a public expression of grief. However, those commands ultimately seem wishful, leaving the speaker to navigate the sorrow alone. This isolation ultimately leads the speaker, in the final stanza, to reject the whole world, claiming that “nothing now can ever come to any good” (line 16).

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