Stop all the clocks by W.H. Auden

Q1 Poem told in the first person, presumably from the poets point of view. The Poem is split into two different halves, during the funeral and after the funeral. During the funeral Auden is shocked at the death of his partner, and wishes for everything in his local area to cease to work. At this point, despite grieving, he perhaps doesn’t quite believe that his lover is gone. After the funeral Auden’s grief intensifies, as the death starts to sink in and Auden is faced with his life without his partner. At this point Auden wishes for the whole universe to end, showing his huge grief that intensified after the funeral. The poem runs in a pattern, Auden at first is demanding everything to stop, before going to the past and considering his life and relationship with his partner, he then comes back to the present, and again demands everything to stop, perhaps this looking back has also contributed to his increased grief.

Q2 The poem deals with the themes of death and the intense grief that can follow. It also is about true love and what happens after it is ended.

Q3 The poem is in four quatrains, each with a slightly theme, and poem is in rhyming couplets, making the poem flow. The reader is left asking who Auden is demanding to stop everything, is it everyone in the world? Or God who presumably he is angry with for taking his partner away. The poem is quite melodramatic, asking for the sun and stars to be destroyed, there is also a hint of hyperbole, using the biggest things in the universe to describe his grief. There is a progression of grief through the poem, taking the audience on a journey, with their sadness increasing with his own. “Pack up the moon and dismantle the sun;” this is a metaphor for the dismantling of Auden’s own life, which he feels has ended with the death of his partner. The reader seems to have been possessive of his lover, he repeats “my” a lot in stanza three, “My week, my rest, my noon, my midnight etc…” Auden seems to have been obsessed with this man, shown through the apparent sole importance of this man.  In stanza two the planes are described as “moaning,” this is a double-meaning as there is the sound of the aeroplanes moaning (this is also an onomatopoeia) and there’s also personification, as if the planes themselves are moaning for the dead man.