He wants the death person that mattered to him to be made aware.
Scribbling on the sky the message he is dead.
He wishes that everyone and everything in his life should stop and pay respect to his loss:
Put crêpe bows round the white necks of the public doves.
The key word in that sentence is ‘public’. Being that he wishes, as I have stated, everyone to notice his loss, and respect his dead lover. He uses doves as they represent peace and freinship. In this section of the poem we can see that W. H. Auden creates a sense of loss. We can summarise this sense of loss in the quotation:
Silence the pianos and with muffled drum
Bring out the coffin, let the mourners come.
This concludes the two stanzas perfectly. The quotation shows that the man wishes for joy to stop and he wants people to mourn.
In the next two stanzas we see his sense of loss changes. In the following stanzas the poet does not write about the mans need for public grievances and stopping of everyday life. Instead he we see how much the deceased lover meant to him and what he compare the love of the man to. The man compares the love of the man to massive things.
“He was my…noon, my midnight, my talk, my song;
This sentence arouses a feeling of loss as it shows that the deceased lover meant so much to the man, that he had become a part off everything in his life. Every normal day chore reminded him of his loss because without the man his world was crushed. We see another example off this loss in the following Quotation:
He was my…working week and my Sunday rest
Here, again, the man is stating that his lover was a part of his normal everyday life.
In the fourth stanza we see how a sense of loss is created when the man wishes to almost pack up his emotions. The man uses massive objects to describe his loss:
Pack up the moon and dismantle the sun
From this we can tell that the mans lost is immense as he is using such enormous object to describe his emotions. He is acting like the objects he is using to describe are trivial. Another example is:
Pour away the ocean and sweep up the wood.
The man is in fact very restrained in what he says his does not directly talk about his emotions, instead he conjures up other ways of talking about the. Such as using objects to portray his emotions, it comes across as him being unselfish, meaning he doesn’t wish for any one to hurt as much as he is.
In the third stanza there is an incident when punctuation is used effectively to show the mans sense of loss.
I thought that love would last forever: I was wrong
In the sentence the colon is used effectively as it as stresses the words ‘I was wrong’. The works well as W.H.Auden has created a sense of loss by making the words more poignant. A break in a sentence immediately causes the reader to pay attention to the words that will follow the break. Therefore the colon causes the reader to notice the sentence and therefore, sense the loss of the man. In the fourth stanza we see a repetition of this punctuation:
The stars are not wanted now: put everyone out
This again, is very effective, it allows the reader to pause and see the significance of words, which are to follow the punctuation. The following words being ‘put everyone one out.’ This sentence provokes a feeling of loss as the man wishes for the stars to be packed, as stars are often described as beautiful and mysterious it is almost like the man wishes for beauty to be packed up. Not only this but stars give us light and since the mans lover was the light in his life he wishes that all the stars should be packed up.
The writer uses a rhyme scheme throughout the poem, which is very effective. It is effective as it made the poem flow smoothly, and this gave a greater sense of loss to the poem. This is because the sentences linked together and therefore all the different feelings of loss that the man described were combined together, giving the poem a more immense feel of loss.
W.H.Auden throughout the poem uses different methods to convey loss. We see the mans wants for public respect and mourn in the first two stanzas. In the final two stanzas we see how the man describes his emotions through objects. W.H.Auden use effective rhyme, punctuality and language to convey a sense of loss in the poem and he does superbly.
