“Funeral Blues” is an elegy.ppt

Introduction to Poetry Analysis Using the rhetorical analysis toolbox: FORM, STYLE, DEVICES EXAMPLE 1 Poetry Explication Project Honors English Wystan Hugh Auden(1907-1973) W.H. Auden: Life and Works Born in York, England As a young man, influenced by the poetry of Thomas Hardy, Robert Frost, William Blake, and Emily Dickinson, and Old English verse. Auden was established as a leading voice of a new generation A well-read author, he had a remarkable intellect and drew easily from a variety of literatures, etc. He often mimicked the style of Dickinson, Yeats, and Henry James. His poetry frequently recounts a journey or quest W.H. Auden: Context Visited many countries and served in the Spanish Civil War In 1939 moved to the U.S. where he married his lover, Chester Kallman, and became an American citizen He was an ardent advocate of Freudian psychoanalysis In his later phase in America, his central preoccupation became Christianity and theory of modern religions P “Funeral Blues” Form The poem “Funeral Blues” is an elegy: a mournful, melancholic poem often spoken at a funeral for the dead Four stanzas, 16 lines The first three stanzas include elements of everyday life, while the last stanza includes elements of the spirit or celestial world, indicating a passing of the spirit from the real world to spirit world. Rhyme scheme: AABB, etc. The rhyme scheme holds the poem together, almost as it holds together the speaker “Funeral Blues” Speaker and POV Written in first person POV: speaker uses I and my The speaker of the poem has lost a love and expresses his grief in a unique way Through an elegy, the speaker expresses that he wants others to feel his pain: silence the world He also realizes that things that were once pleasurable are no longer that way When things are wrong in nature, they are wrong everywhere The speaker may be homosexual—refers to the deceased as “he,” and if we assume Auden is the speaker, he is a man as well “Funeral Blues” Style TONE