Funeral Blues Funeral Blues "Funeral Blues" or "Stop all the clocks" is a poem by W. H. Auden. An early version was published in 1936, but the poem in its final, familiar form was first published in "The Year's Poetry" (London, 1938). The first, and less widely known, version of the poem, written and published in 1936, has five stanzas; the 1938 final version has four. Only the first two stanzas are the same in both versions. The 1936 version was a satiric poem of mourning for a political leader, written for the verse play "The Ascent of F6", by Auden and
The Weary Blues out loud the rhyme scheme is pleasing to the ear. It is also worth noting that the poem ends with three rhyming lines: “the singer stopped playing and went to bed / While the Weary Blues echoed through his head / He slept like a rock or a man that’s dead.” The last three lines are a finite conclusion. The rest of the poem builds and builds until its end. The music in “The Weary Blues” is a metaphor for life as a black man. The color in the poem is symbolic of the black struggle. It starts with slave