Stop All the Clocks

The context of ‘Stop All the Clocks’

We begin with the biographical, historical, and literary contexts of ‘Stop All the Clocks’.

Biographical context

W. H. Auden was born in 1872 in Birmingham, England. He and his long-time friend and collaborator Christopher Isherwood were among the first openly gay writers of the twentieth century. For this reason, the poem is often read in LGBTQIA contexts, and it was used at the funerals of many gay men during the AIDS crisis of the 1980s and 1990s. This reading of the poem is famously used in the 1994 film Four Weddings and a Funeral, where a gay man delivers the poem as an elegy for his dead partner.

Historical context

The poem was written in the 1930s when fascist views were becoming increasingly popular in Europe, reaching a boiling point in 1939 with the outbreak of World War II. Auden and Isherwood both firmly believed in left-wing politics and were against imperialism. Their political beliefs and the wider context of Europe were great influences on how the two men collaborated to write the first iteration of the poem.

Literary context

The poem was not published until 1938, but its first iteration was actually composed in 1936. The poem started as a song in the play The Ascent of F6 (1936), which Auden and Isherwood wrote together. The play was created as a satire of British imperialism. In the play, this poem was performed by a character grieving the death of a politician. The language was purposefully melodramatic to highlight the absurdity of the situation.

The poem was then partially rewritten and given to cabaret singer Hedli Anderson to perform. It was changed considerably to be used for Anderson’s cabaret performance; for instance, it was originally set to music. The final three stanzas were rewritten so they would not reference the play, and the poem also became more serious and sincere.

The poem was first published in Auden’s 1938 collection, Poems of To-Day, and was further published in his 1940 collection Another Time. As a stand-alone poem, ‘Stop All the Clocks’ has a more mournful tone.

The poem: ‘Stock All the Clocks’ or ‘Funeral Blues‘

W. H. Auden's ‘Stop All the Clocks’: Summary

Let us begin with a brief stanza-by-stanza summary of the poem.

Stanza one

The first three lines are comprised of imperatives listing the different requests that the speaker has. In the final line, the speaker references a coffin, letting the reader know that someone has died.

Stanza two

This stanza deals with public mourning as the speaker requests that planes, public birds, and policemen join him in grieving.

Stanza three

The third stanza discusses how the speaker feels about the deceased as he talks about what his late lover meant to him.

Stanza four

The final part of the poem sees the speaker’s mourning become hopeless, as nothing can be good without his love.

The structure of ‘Stop All the Clocks’

Here we consider issues such as the poem’s rhyme scheme, form, caesura, enjambment, and end-stop lines.

Rhyme scheme

Auden uses an AABB rhyme scheme in the poem, which is paired with an iambic pentameter that runs throughout the piece. This combination is called a heroic couplet, and it helps to create a musical nature to the poem, which, of course, we know is linked to the poem having originally been set to music. By using this scheme, Auden transforms the poem into a kind of funeral song.

Form

The poem is written in the form of an elegy, which is commonly associated with funerals. It creates a mournful and sad tone.

Caesura

Auden uses caesuras (a pause in a line of poetry) frequently in this poem. Examples occur in lines one and four: ‘Stop all the clocks, cut off the telephone’, and ‘Bring out the coffin, let the mourners come’. The caesuras break up each line into two halves, replicating the breaks and pause the speaker would take during a real elegy. This creates a disjointed rhythm to the poem that mimics the pauses of a real elegy given at a funeral.

Enjambment

Auden contrasts the caesuras by also using enjambment (one line continuing into the other, with no punctuation breaks). Examples can be found at the beginning of stanza two: ‘Let aeroplanes circle moaning overhead / Scribbling on the sky the message “He is Dead”’. This replicates the patterns of someone speaking at a funeral while showing that the speaker’s thought is not yet complete.

End-stop lines

Every stanza in the poem finishes with an end-stop line (full stops at the end of a line), for example, ‘For nothing now can ever come to any good’. Auden uses end-stop lines to emphasise the finality of death. Nothing continues after the full stop, just as life will not continue (either literally or metaphorically) after the funeral.

The poetic devices of ‘Stop All the Clocks’

Here, we consider the title, the imagery, and the use of metaphor in the poem.

The title

The official title of the poem is ‘Funeral Blues’, but it is commonly referred to as ‘Stop All the Clock’ because of its use in the film Four Weddings and a Funeral (1994).

Imagery

Auden uses imagery throughout the poem to not only describe the funeral but also help the reader understand the grief that the speaker is feeling.

Animals

The speaker instructs to ‘Prevent the dog from barking with a juicy bone’, by which he means to stop life from moving on naturally. The speaker feels that if he can prevent the dog from doing something normal, natural life may pause.

The speaker also includes doves in his grief, instructing to ‘Put crepe bows round the white necks of the public doves’. Doves are traditionally used as symbols of love and peace. However, here the imagery is inverted as the doves represent death and grief. These doves are ‘public’, which emphasises that the speaker feels the mourning for the deceased should not be private. This idea could be linked to the LGBTQIA context of the poem, as the speaker refuses to mourn privately, despite the risk that mourning publicly would have posed due to his sexuality.

Navigation

Auden references the stars, moon, and points of the compass. ‘He was my North, my South, my East and West’. This image shows how important the dead man was to the speaker and how all-encompassing his grief is, as he cannot navigate the world without him, while at the same time being the only thing the speaker is led to. This is shown further by repeating the idea, but with the stars, moon, and sun.

Black clothing

The imagery of black clothing is used in the line ‘Let the traffic policemen wear black cotton gloves’. The speaker feels that public mourning should occur at this funeral. Of course, the request is unrealistic, as the speaker cannot expect such public mourning to happen. Yet the speaker feels that the grief is so overpowering and colossal that it should be universal; everyone else should feel it, too.

Metaphor

Auden frequently uses metaphors (a figure of speech where something stands for something else) in this poem. A notable example occurs in the third stanza.

The speaker is not saying that the deceased person was literally his working week. Instead, Auden uses metaphors to show just how important the dead person was to the speaker. He refers to his lover as his ‘Sunday rest’, which links the ideas of religion and love. The speaker states that his lover was like a religion to him.

The meaning of ‘Stop All the Clocks’

While there is never one clear-cut meaning in poetry, many people reach similar conclusions about ‘Stop All the Clocks’, i.e., that it is a poem that deals with grief and the misery that can come with it. This is because the speaker is coming to terms with a great loss. The poet uses metaphors, imagery, and instructions in a first-person account to show that the speaker is grieving and how he is dealing with the emotion.

Tone

The poem takes on a tone of mourning. It is seen as a classic example of an elegiac poem (a poem that is an elegy) as it uses poetic devices such as metaphor and imagery to show the grief that the speaker is feeling. This sorrowful tone is perhaps seen best in the final line, ‘For nothing now can ever come to any good’. Here, the plosive ending ‘good’ indicates that there is a clear and firm ending to both the speech and death.

The themes of ‘Stop All the Clocks’

The poem’s key themes are love and death.

Love

The theme of love is seen throughout the poem. The poet uses poetic devices in order to show the love between the speaker and the deceased, such as metaphor, as was mentioned above.

Auden uses the last line of the third stanza to show that love is fleeting:

The caesura isolates the final three words of the poem to emphasise the isolated pain the speaker is feeling. This statement shows that love is not something that can last forever but is finite.

Death

The poem also deals with the theme of death: it is, after all, called ‘Funeral Blues’. The poem looks at how love cannot be everlasting in the face of death, despite how deeply it can be felt. The speaker pleads with the reader to hide all forms of life, as shown in the below quote:

Yet despite this imperative, the world will continue anyway. The poem explores death in a hopeless way, knowing that love cannot exist forever because of it. Death becomes a mental conflict for the speaker to tackle. The speaker’s view of the world has changed following this death: ‘I thought that love would last forever: I was wrong’. Now, in the wake of the death, he is conflicted about this view while also grieving.