(Stop All The Clocks)

Funeral Blues

Simon Callow as Gareth and John Hannah as Matthew in Four Weddings and a Funeral

For many, Four Weddings and a Funeral was an unforgettable movie which defined time and age and space.

From the film’s first word – an expletive - to a funeral where there was barely a dry eye in the cinema, four decades on, it remains an unforgettable film not just for its brilliant script, but it’s gorgeously acted verisimilitude. It was Hugh Grant at his best, and Andie McDowell at her most beautiful.

But this post is about something else. The funeral, amongst all the weddings.

I still remember that scene when the liveliest of a bunch of friends (Simon Callow as Gareth) drops dead in the middle of a particularly uproarious scene, when a friend is getting married. At the memorial, his completely broken boyfriend (John Hannah as Matthew) recites this fabulous Auden sunset poem. 

The elegy is suffused with grief, as the narrator almost pleads with the world to give cognizance to this incredibly momentous tragedy, instead of going on with its normalities. 

It's a deeply-felt poem, and the narrator's increasing agitation makes him want to shake the world by  making unreasonable demands of it. The last lines ask the impossible, that one should pack up the moon and dismantle the sun and put out the stars....but in that hyperbole lies the entirety of the poet's anguish.

This heartfelt dirge is like a cut of a heart which seems to know no consolation.

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The poem

"Funeral Blues (Stop All The Clocks)" by W H Auden

Stop all the clocks, cut off the telephone,

Prevent the dog from barking with a juicy bone,

Silence the pianos and with muffled drum

Bring out the coffin, let the mourners come.

.

Let aeroplanes circle moaning overhead

Scribbling on the sky the message ‘He is Dead’.

Put crepe bows round the white necks of the public doves,

Let the traffic policemen wear black cotton gloves.

.

He was my North, my South, my East and West,

My working week and my Sunday rest,

My noon, my midnight, my talk, my song;

I thought that love would last forever: I was wrong.

.

The stars are not wanted now; put out every one,

Pack up the moon and dismantle the sun,

Pour away the ocean and sweep up the wood;

For nothing now can ever come to any good.

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See the poem recited in this excerpt from Four Weddings & A Funeral. You will not have a dry eye, I promise you.

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Other pieces on death and remembrances -

I Love You

If I Commit Suicide

She Held His Hand As He Drifted

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