Scarica WYSTAN HUGH AUDEN - FUNERAL BLUES e più Appunti in PDF di Inglese solo su Docsity! WYSTAN HUGH AUDEN Wystan Hugh Auden was born in York. He was the leader of the ‘Oxford poets’, a group of intellectuals who continued the artistic revolution started by James Joyce. As a young man, he was deeply engaged in social and political issues. In fact, he witnessed the rise of Nazism, the Spanish Civil War and he expressed solidarity with the Jews persecuted by Hitler. He was homosexual and Homosexuality was considered a criminal offence in England, so he decided to move to New York. Because of this it is possible to divide his career into two phases: At the beginning of his career, the English period, he was deeply by Karl Marx, so he started to underline the importance of the engagement of the individual with history, to continually question the social and political climate in which one lived. The move to America freed him from his social responsibility, and he developed a style that refused identification with a single poetic culture because according to him, Auden’s themes are various: he deals with love, modern suffering (religious doubt, sickness, the passing of time), death (Funeral Blues). Political and social problems are other central issues: Auden affirms that the State considers citizens as statistics and numbers. Also, Refugee Blues deals with the problem of citizenship, faced by Jews in America, when they escape from Germany, in which he describes the horrors of war and totalitarianism. The theme of the quest recurs in both periods, but the message is different. In the English society the quest is for a new society and new self, while in the American period he expresses hope for the future, emphasising the importance of freedom. FUNERAL BLUES This poem, written by Auden, is about a friend who died during the war. The title of the poem, ‘Funeral Blues,’ create immediately an effect of sadness and melancholy. The blues, in fact, is a sad type of music and emphasizes the idea of melancholy, already implied in the word "funeral’’. The poem is divided into four stanzas, each one composed by four lines; it starts in medias res. In the first stanza he demands silence through imperative verbs. In the second stanza, the poet requires that the message "He is dead" must be written on the sky and that people and animals must wear a sign of mourning to honour and remember the dead. In the third stanza we can see the close relationship between the poet and the dead: the dead person was a referring point in the life of the poet. There is a declaration of love where the poet says his friend was his reason of life. In the fourth stanza the poet goes back to the imperative pointing out he loved this person so much that death deprives poet’s life of its meaning, there is nothing that can give him love. In this poem Auden uses many imperatives to give an emphatic tone to the poem. He also uses an everyday language. There are a lot of adyunation ("Pack up the moon", "Dismantle the sun" l.14; "Pour away the ocean", "Sweep up the wood" l,15), metaphors. For someone like the speaker who has suffered a loss, the world is transformed. But to everyone else, nothing changes. Time slow fast and no one cares what’s happening.
