W.H. Auden's

Funeral Blues

Worksheet 1:
Stanza 3 & 4

Emma Kendall
Knowledge4Africa.com
Updated: 7 November 2006

NOTES
Wystan Hugh Auden is regarded by many as the most influential poet of the 20th century, a man who inspired other giants of the poetic world such as C. Day-Lewis, Louis MacNeice, and Stephen Spender.
He was born in 1907 in York, the son of a medical practitioner and a university-educated mother. He attended Oxford University where he graduated in 1928 with a lowly 3rd class degree in Literature.
While at Oxford, he became known for his poetry and his eccentricities and, most notably, for his series of homosexual relationships.
Auden became a schoolmaster, which later allowed T.S. Eliot to criticise him for allowing his pedantic teaching style to influence his poetry.
In 1935 he married Erika Mann, a German lesbian who needed to escape from Germany. The marriage was one of convenience, designed purely to provide her with British citizenship.
During the 1930s Auden became enamoured with left-wing politics and social causes, although he would later tire of the contradictions inherent in this. Eventually he would claim that politics and art could never be combined.
In January 1939, shortly before the outbreak of war, he sailed for New York. Because this was seen as desertion from his homeland which was about to be embroiled in conflict, he lost much of his reputation in England. As a result, he settled in the United States and eventually took out citizenship.
While there, he established a permanent relationship with the 18 year old poet, Chester Kallman, who would become his lifelong companion.
Auden would lecture literature at several universities, including Oxford where his tenure demanded that he give only three lectures per year.
He would die in Vienna in 1973, shortly after delivering a guest lecture there.

Read the notes in the left column before answering the questions below:

STANZA 3:

"He was my North, my South, my East and West,
My working week and my Sunday rest,
My noon, my midnight, my talk, my song;
I thought that love would last forever: I was wrong."

What is an oxymoron? (2)

Have oxymorons been used in this verse? If so, explain their purpose. (3)

[Need help?]

The poet says, "I thought that love would last forever: I was wrong." Why is he wrong? (3)

[Need help?]

STANZA 4:

"The stars are not wanted now; put out every one,
Pack up the moon and dismantle the sun,
Pour away the ocean and sweep up the woods;
For nothing now can ever come to any good."