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 Traveller (poem) his Tory suspicion of commerce. Readers of all ages soon began to discover "The Traveller"’s merits. The 17-year-old Charles James Fox admired the poem; a few years later the even younger William Wordsworth read "The Traveller", and was influenced by it when he wrote his earliest surviving poem, "Lines Written as a School Exercise". The poem's critical reception continued high, though it often suffered by comparison with his "The Deserted Village". The bibliographer Egerton Brydges preferred "The Traveller": The sentiments are always interesting, generally just, and often new; the imagery is elegant, picturesque, and occasionally sublime; the language is nervous,