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'Funeral Blues' by W. H. Auden [written for a unfinished book on poetical manuscripts]

W.H. Auden decided to become at poet at 3.30 one afternoon in March 1922 ('...I knew / That very moment what I wished to do'). He confirmed his ambition to his Oxford tutor at their first meeting: 'I am going to be a poet...I mean a great poet.'

He is now almost universally recognised as having become the leading English poet of his generation, noted for his range, technical mastery and fertile versatility, as well as for his prolific output, the acuity of his ear, and for his poetical and aphoristic fluency. He has also been acclaimed 'supreme among modern poets as a writer of songs.' Perhaps because it is a song, 'Stop all the clocks' is comparatively free of those characteristics of his poetry, especially from the thirties, most frequently commented on by the critics -- namely, his objective, even detached attitude; his complexity; his tendency towards generalisation, abstraction and the conceptual ('Coming out of me living is always thinking').

'Stop all the clocks' shares with his own euphoric poem 'A Summer Night' an unself-conscious freedom in its association of images not often indulged in Auden's work; and they both contain references to the four points of the compass ('Now North and South and East and West / Those I love lie down to rest...'). The song was first composed as a burlesque dirge of five verses on the death of a secular saviour in The Ascent of F6 (1936) where it ended, as can be seen text given in the appendix at the end of this book, with three verses that formed part of the plot of the play. The next time it appeared in print, in Another Time (1940), it was as a cabaret song of four verses with the title 'Funeral Blues'. It was then in its final state (although the title was to be dropped in Collected Poems) with the last three verses replaced by two new ones, as seen in this manuscript -- and recently used in the film Four Weddings and a Funeral. [This is surely one occasion on which the critics would unite in not condemning his customary practice of revising his work even after publication]. The two replacement verses would seem to owe something to that magnificent Irish lament 'Donal Og', of which Auden would have been aware from his reading of Yeats, and which ends in the translation by Lady Gregory:

You have taken the East from me; you have taken the West from me;
you have taken what is before me and what is behind me
you have taken the moon, you have taken the sun from me
and my fear is great that you have taken God from me!

It is known from an accompanying but undated letter that the present manuscript was submitted for publication in an anthology, a circumstance that no doubt accounts for its unusual legibility. Auden's normal handwriting has been described as the sort that 'an airborne daddy-longlegs might have managed with a dangling leg'. In its roughest form, particularly when in pencil, Auden's hand degenerates into a personal shorthand that almost defies interpretation, except through a combination of guesswork based on the context and rhyming scheme and the deployment of skills more commonly associated with one of his favoured pastimes, the crossword. He was habitually careless of punctuation marks, perhaps rightly regarding them as 'breathing indications', although much of his punctuation in the present manuscript is to be preferred over that in the final version. The use of the brief interim title 'Blues' in it may help to date this manuscript between the publication of The Ascent of F6 and Another Time. The paper it is written on was evidently torn out of one of the tall notebooks Auden had a preference for, and it has at some time been subjected to damp, hence the slight fuzziness, even of the ruled lines. The present manuscript has the reading and in line 9 which seems weaker than the repetition of my for the third time as in the printed text, and could in line 12 for would. It is difficult to be sure quite what happened in line 2, but it may be that Auden began to misspell the word guard, crossed out ga, wrote the first letter again, but immediately deleted it on realising that he did not need any word at all to qualify dog. The repetition of ocean in the penultimate line of the poem is probably explained by his not having written the word clearly enough the first time. Woods in the same line seems to have been just a mistake, given its rhyme with singular good.

Auden's working methods have been usefully summarised by his biographer, Humphrey Carpenter: His actual method of writing poetry remained much the same throughout his life. He usually worked in a large notebook with a stiff cover, in which he would begin by writing out, on the right-hand page, a first draft of the poem, either in pencil or pen. Sometimes he would make use of a phrase, or a list of words, or a table of rhymes, which he has already jotted down in the notebook; but often the new poem would be begun without any apparent sign of preparation. After writing a first version, he would then insert revisions of some passages on the opposite page, which was otherwise left blank. Next would come a fair copy which...[increasingly he] typed -- he was an adequate two-fingered typist...After typing the fair copy, the poem would usually undergo further changes before it was printed. When, as sometimes happened, a poem failed to turn out satisfactorily, he would simply abandon it, leaving it unfinished in the notebook.

Auden described himself as looking 'like an unmade bed', and in his long poem 'Letter to Lord Byron', he observed honestly:

My head looks like an egg upon a plate; /...I have no proper eyebrows, and my eyes / Are far too close together to look nice...I can't think what my It had on It's mind / To give me flat feet and a big behind...

His eccentric appearance and his wilful flouting of social conventions were counter-balanced by an almost pathological punctuality and lifelong quest for intellectual and inner order.

Celebrated for its craquelure, his face really belonged in the British Museum, according to his close friend and collaborator Christopher Isherwood. Auden's own comparison of it with 'a wedding cake left out in the rain' is as striking as his definition of poetry as 'memorable speech'.

His was a prodigious talent and achievement. Eliot's Collected Poems consists of about 5,500 lines; that of Yeats of some 14,000 -- Auden's contains more than 30,000.

Bibliography: W.H. Auden, Collected Poems, edited by Edward Mendelson, 1976 (revised 1991) W.H. Auden, The English Auden, edited by Edward Mendelson, 1986 W.H. Auden, Forewords and Afterwords, selected by Edward Mendelson, 1973 Edward Mendelson, Early Auden, 1981 Edward Callan, Auden, a Carnival of Intellect, 1983 Monroe Spears, The Poetry of W.H. Auden The Disenchanted Island, 1963 W.H. Auden, ACollection of Critical Essays, edited by Monroe Spears, 1987 John Fuller, A Reader's Guide to W.H. Auden, 1970