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Commentary On Lake Of Innisfree

The poem “Funeral Blues” was written by Wystan Hugh Auden. The poem is about someone who has just lost their loved one. We cannot distinguish if it is a man or a woman who is grieving the loss or if the person has died or just left the person. There are some indications as to whether the person has died because the poet uses dark imagery such as “black cotton gloves” which implies that the “loved one” has died. The reason why we cannot determine the gender of the speaker is that the poet Wystan Hugh Auden was a homosexual and this poem could be based on one of his past experiences. However, we can tell that the person he/she has lost is a man because at the start of the third stanza it says “He was my North, my South, my East and West.”
The poem is written as a quatrain with a rhyme scheme of AABB also known as rhyming couplets. The rhyme scheme holds together the poem. This could suggest that the speaker is trying to put their life back together after their loss.
The overall tone of the poem is very sombre. The sombre tone is expressed in the poems title and supported in the first stanza. The speaker demands silence at when the funeral starts which she expresses in the first stanza. The first line “Stop all the clocks, cut off the telephone,” has a big impact on the reader. It creates a sense of drama but at the same time it could also mean that the speaker wants to be “cut off” from the rest of the world. The first stanza also uses the words piano, dog and drum. The fact that the poet has used a dog with a bone and told it not to bark shows that the speaker is not feeling playful at this time and the fact he has used musical instruments, telling them to silence shows that he/she doesn’t even want to hear music.
The second stanza marks the sad occasion and like the first stanza shows the attitude of the speaker. The expressions “moaning overhead” and “muffled drum” (from stanza 1) are examples of assonance and mix the attitude of the speaker with the sombre...