By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)
Written in 1947, ‘The Fall of Rome’ is one of W. H. Auden’s finest poems of his middle period. Although he had made his name as a poet in the 1930s – indeed, as the most celebrated English poet of that decade – he continued to be prolific for the next three-and-a-half decades until his death in 1973.
By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)
W. H. Auden’s poem ‘Stop all the clocks’ – poem number IX in his Twelve Songs, and also sometimes known as ‘Funeral Blues’ – is a poem so famous and universally understood that perhaps it is unnecessary to offer much in the way of textual analysis.
Yet we’re going to offer some notes towards an analysis of ‘Funeral Blues’ in this post, because if a poem does touch us and move us in some way – especially so many of us – it’s always worth trying to explain why.