Poetry has always played a powerful role in funerals. Celebrants will often choose or ask a family to choose a poem that captures a moment or a life perfectly, and in a few well crafted lines. Sometimes, as in the Lonely Funeral project, a poem is all that remains. Something beautiful created from a few fragments of a lonely life.
One poem that is often chosen is WH Auden’s Funeral Blues. “Stop all the clocks……He was my North, my South, my East and West”. It was read by John Hannah in the film Four Weddings and a Funeral, and no doubt that led to its being used at many farewell ceremonies. The final line capturing the anguish of grief: “I thought that love would last for ever: I was wrong.”
I’ve always admired the poetry of Auden and in thinking about adapting my work to addressing environmental grief, I have been reading some of his work. Not so much to “praise the mutilated world” but to explore the causes of where we are.
Auden lived through the 1930s, a time of dictators. Monsters who promised glory for their peoples and who delivered little more than ruin. Here is perhaps the most succinct description of the “strong” man, Epitaph on a Tyrant. The line about respectable senators busting with laughter at even the most pathetic attempts at humour by the great man rings especially sharply in our age of spectacle.
Epitaph on a Tyrant: written in 1939 and still sadly as relevant today.
(Poem courtesy of the Poems on the [London] Underground)