Stop All The Clocks- W.H. Auden

Auden’s poem follows a traditional rhyming scheme of AABB and has four stanzas with four lines in each. The poem has a generally pessimistic tone and this is because the narrator is mourning the death of a loved one. The opening line “Stop all the clocks, cut off the telephone” proposes unrealistic actions which imply the narrator has been heavily struck by grief, and would prefer that the world stopped altogether. Furthermore, the reference to time may be a comment on the brevity of life and how the clocks have stopped for the deceased.

The first stage of grief is often denial and this is represented in the opening stanza by the narrator’s unrealistic propositions. The second stanza opens with the lines “Let aeroplanes circle moaning overhead/ Scribbling on the sky the message He is dead.” The use of the word ‘moaning’ to describe the noise made by the planes is effective because it’s similar to the word ‘mourning’ and represents the aspect of death in the poem. The image of a plane writing the message ‘He is dead’ in the sky suggests that the person who has died was well known, and this is reinforced by the idea of putting “crepe bows round the white necks of the public doves.” However, planes are unlikely to share this message and public doves are unlikely to wear crepe bows making these more unrealistic propositions and further evidence of the narrator’s denial.

With the third stanza comes an obvious shift in tone. An intimate relationship is implied by the fact that “He was my North, my South, my East and West/ My working week and my Sunday rest”. The reader learns that a man has died, however the relationship is never made explicit. The poem could be a man mourning a man, a woman mourning a man or even a man/woman mourning someone that they didn’t know personally but who had a powerful influence on their life (politician, celebrity etc.) Although the narrator is left partially ambiguous, the final line of the third stanza, “I thought that love would last forever”, suggests naivety, and reinforces the narrator’s disillusioned interpretation of time.

The narrator becomes angry in the final stanza, and Auden uses hyperbolic metaphor’s such as “Pack up the moon and dismantle the sun” to represent the void left by the lovers death. The final line is extremely pessimistic: “nothing now can ever come to any good”. This is further evidence of the narrator’s depressive state and concludes the poem in the same melancholy tone that has persisted throughout. Auden’s narrator is hyperbolic, disillusioned and unrealistic, and this is arguably a comment on the power of love to bypass reason and reality, in this case unfortunately for the worse.