By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)
The line ‘Stop all the clocks, cut off the telephone’ has been added to the great opening lines of English poetry, taking its place alongside Wordsworth’s ‘I wandered lonely as a cloud’, Keats’s ‘A thing of beauty is a joy forever’, Blake’s ‘Tyger! Tyger! burning bright’, and Shakespeare’s ‘Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day’.
The poem which begins with those words is W. H. Auden’s ‘Stop All the Clocks’, although that’s not its official title. It’s often known as ‘Funeral Blues’, but that’s not its proper title either. Technically, it should probably be referred to as ‘Twelve Songs XI’, but admittedly that’s less snappy.
A Misunderstood Poem
‘Stop All the Clocks’ (as it’s commonly known) is a poem so famous and universally understood that, well, we all misunderstand it. Or at least, we misunderstand how it began life, not as a serious and heartfelt elegy, but as a piece of satire making fun of 1930s music and the over-the-top nature of public obituaries.
You read that right: this supposedly serious poem was originally conceived as a piece of burlesque sending up blues lyrics of the period. Auden wrote this early version of ‘Stop All the Clocks’ for a play he was collaborating on with Christopher Isherwood, The Ascent of F6 (1936): a comedy, although it was advertised (with tongues firmly in cheeks) as a ‘tragedy’.
Even when the poem was first reworked for a different purpose, it was still not exactly a wholly serious, ‘straight’ elegy. In 1938, Auden removed a stanza from the mock-serious song from two years earlier and the poem became part of the libretto for a cabaret whose music was provided by Auden’s occasional collaborator, the composer Benjamin Britten.
It was eventually finalised in its familiar form in Another Time, Auden’s poetry collection from 1940 (probably his finest and most consistent volume bringing together many of his classic poems from the second half of the 1930s).
A Revival
‘Stop All the Clocks’ then came to the attention of a new generation some time after Auden’s death in 1973. In this new context, in the late twentieth century, the poem firmly became a mournful and serious piece, and attracted new people to Auden’s work.
No, I’m not talking about Four Weddings and a Funeral – although Mike Newell’s 1994 film, with its crackling script by Richard Curtis and cast of well-known British faces, certainly did more than anything else to make Auden’s poem popular.
But almost a decade earlier, ‘Stop All the Clocks’ had been chosen as the elegiac piece to be inscribed on a sculpture commemorating the football fans who had died in the Heysel Stadium disaster of 1985. ‘Funeral Blues’ was now truly funereal.
Excessive Reaction
‘Funeral Blues’ is a poem mourning somebody who has died. It’s a kind of elegy, then, to give it the formal, technical name for a poem of this kind.
But a closer look – indeed, even a fairly cursory but shrewd one – at the poem’s demands reveal an excessive response to a person’s death. The speaker’s grief is so all-consuming that he really wants not only to disconnect the telephone so he can be left to grieve in peace but to stop the clocks and shut off the outside world altogether.
And really, who stops all the clocks when someone suffers a personal tragedy, apart from Miss Havisham?
Similarly, requests to extinguish all of the stars in the night sky or to pour away all the oceans are hysterical expressions of excessive grief, rather than reasonable responses to losing someone.
Even asking the traffic policemen to don black gloves in recognition of the passing of the dead person seems rather presumptuous. It also flirts with the comical, reducing grief from the domestic zone of familiarity (and the familial) to the public, professional world of traffic and law enforcement: hardly a romantic or ‘poetic’ sphere at the best of times.
The Extremes of Grief
Curiously, though, that final stanza about pouring away the ocean and putting out the stars was written by Auden after he’d decided to ‘liberate’ the first couple of stanzas of the poem from the burlesque that was The Ascent of F6. So were the lines in the original half of the poem moving lines in a supposedly parodic poem, or are the lines in the latter half of the poem unintentionally parodic despite appearing in a serious poem?
I don’t mean to belittle Auden’s poem. It’s a fine expression of grief that attains its power as an elegy precisely from its occasional leaps into – or at least gestures towards – hyper-emotional despair in the face of great loss.
Perhaps an elegy must always take us to these extremes if it is to express how we truly feel when in the grip of severe grief and it really does feel as if everything in the universe is pointless and unnecessary without that one person who made it all worthwhile?