Nisha Kanabar 10R
Poetry Commentary
Stop All the Clocks by W.H. Auden
Wystan Hugh (formally known as W.H) Auden was born in York, England, in 1907. Influenced by the work of Emily Dikinson, Robert Frost and some other poets, he published his first book of verse in 1928. Ever since, he has been recognized and admired for his incomparable technicality and his ability to write verses in many different forms. “Stop all the clocks” is one of Auden’s most prominent poems; this lyrical ambiguity is what I will be depicting throughout this commentary. At first, when I read the title “Stop all the clocks”, I was quite confused at what it could mean. I knew that it had to be figurative in some way since it didn’t make any sense otherwise. I did not realize, until later, that I was quite wrong. It was not only the way the poem commenced, but it mostly portrayed the standstill of time in a slightly blunt way. The poem is actually about the death of a loved one, and the emotion of the person’s lover (who is the speaker). I did not know this, however, until I had read the poem completely.
Before I began to analyze this poem, I decided to first dissect the rhyme scheme. It was one of the most simple and basic rhyme schemes I had ever come across, being “a / a / b / b / c / c / d / d / e / e / f / f / g / g / h / h”. I decided that there was nothing spectacular about this, except that later I found it added a dull rhythmic emphasis, or a sense of atmospheric gloominess. Once I had gotten that out of the way, I began to analyze the first stanza. As I mentioned, the poem began with “Stop all the clocks”, just like the title. Just reading this, makes one think “Why?” and instantly adds an element of mystery. The whole line itself, “Stop all the clocks, cut off the telephone” has this particular effect on the reader. “Cut off the telephone” is just a figurative way of wanting no communication with anyone, slightly shut away from society. All of lines 1-4 depict this very mood and theme. The speaker does not seem to want anything happy, he/she wants silence and especially grief. Until line 4, “Bring out the coffin, let the mourners come”, I did not know why this was so. Line 4 shows that the speaker has lost a loved one through death. The most interesting feature of this stanza is the idiom “muffled drum”. I feel that the “muffled drum” represents the gloomy, dullness of the situation; the sound of mourning. The repetitive nature of the drum creates an unexplainable tedious imagery, and the fact that it is “muffled” makes it rather emphatic in a distant, silenced way.
