For nothing now can ever come to any good.”
Auden tries to convey the feeling of true love for this person to the reader, he tells the reader of how much the friend or lover means to him,
“He was my North, my South, my East and West,
My working week and my Sunday rest,
My moon, my midnight, my talk, my song;
I thought that love would last forever: I was wrong.”
We assume that the person who has died is Auden’s lover. This suggests that Auden was in a homosexual relationship as they are both men.
“He was my North, my South, my East and West.”
Rossetti is also very close to her lover but it is not as obvious as Auden. Perhaps it is because Auden is writing immediately after the death has happened.
In ‘Remember’ the terrible event hasn’t yet taken place and Rossetti is still trying to make things happy for the time that she has left.
They both have strong use of rhyme and rhythm but in different ways. In ‘Stop all the clocks’, Auden uses rhyming couplets in all four stanzas.
“Stop all the clocks, cut off the telephone,
Prevent the dog from barking with a juicy bone”
Rossetti also uses rhyme but it is not as obvious as Auden’s. She uses some couplets. Lines one, four, five and eight end with the same syllable – ay. Where the mood becomes more comforting at line nine, she changes the rhyme scheme.
Rossetti has written the whole poem in a single stanza of fourteen lines with one flowing train of thought. She uses ten syllables in each line except for line eleven where she only uses nine. I think this is because it is an enjambment. It has a smooth, flowing rhythm.
In stanza three, Auden changes from what he wants to happen, to what his lover meant to him. To emphasize this he changes the rhythm and metre. In the first three lines of the third stanza, he lists what his lover meant to him and because he does this, he alters the rhythm and makes it a more punctuated metre. These three lines are all metaphor for how he felt. Auden is implying that without his lover, he is nothing.
“He was my North, my South, my East and West
My working week and my Sunday rest,
My moon, my midnight, my talk, my song;”
Auden opens with the phrase “Stop all the clocks”. This means that he wants time to come to a stand still because he is so devastated. He doesn’t want anything to happen as it would usually. He is distraught and he wants the whole world to know so much so that he wants
“Aeroplanes (to) circle moaning overhead
Scribbling in the sky the message He Is Dead”
Notice each word begins with a capital letter. This is emphasize the fact that his lover is in-fact dead.
Auden asks for a lot of things to happen throughout this poem. Some of them being impossible.
“The stars are not wanted now: put out everyone;
Pack up the moon and dismantle the sun;
Pour away the ocean and sweep away the wood.”
He asks for everything to show a sign of respect. This is shown by Auden saying;
“Put crêpe bows round the white necks of the public doves
Let the traffic policemen wear black cotton gloves.”
To end the poem, Auden has talked about how life will never
be the same without this person in his life. He has got no hope what
so ever for the future.
“For nothing now can ever come to any good”
Rossetti uses euphemisms throughout the poem. She never actually mentions the words death, or dying, even though we understand
from the use of the phrase;
“Gone far away into the silent land”
She ends the poem trying to make the reader forget about the
sad event.
“Better by far that you should forget and smile
Than that you should remember and be sad”
Of the two poems, I prefer ‘Stop all the clocks’. This is because I like the use of rhythm and rhyme. It also had a bigger impact on me because he is not euphemistic. The whole poem cries out Auden’s devastation because “He Is Dead”.
